[VoiceOps] Vitelity Inbound SMS Outage March 27, 2022 0150 to 1720 UTC

[Peter Beckman]

I integrated with Vitelity for SMS in August 2013.

My first evidence that UTF-8 was supported was January 13, 2017.

There are weird issues with Vitelity, such as odd length limits to SMS
messages, but we worked around them. SMS is reliable enough, though the 48
outages since August 2015 should give you an idea on how high a priority
the service is to them compared to voice.

When did you last test SMS with Vitelity? I have several years of SMS
metric data on Vitelity SMS:

 	+------+----------+---------+----------+
 	| yr   | success% | failed% | delayed% |
 	+------+----------+---------+----------+
 	| 2015 |   98.42% |   1.58% |    3.17% |
 	| 2016 |   96.31% |   3.69% |    5.30% |
 	| 2017 |   96.68% |   3.32% |    2.79% |
 	| 2018 |   92.22% |   7.78% |    6.24% |
 	| 2019 |   94.46% |   5.54% |    1.50% |
 	| 2020 |   98.41% |   1.59% |    0.71% |
 	| 2021 |   97.75% |   2.25% |    2.51% |
 	| 2022 |   98.61% |   1.39% |    0.24% |
 	+------+----------+---------+----------+

2018-2019 sucked!

This is based on a baseline of sending an SMS once every 10 minutes to one of
our active DIDs that has least recently received an Inbound SMS message.

Delayed is any SMS that took more than 10 seconds to receive. The average
receipt time for 2022 is 2.28 seconds. Bandwidth beats that at 1.18 seconds
average for 2022.

Both are acceptable.

** NOTE these numbers may be attributable to outages by the sending carrier.
They are not easily excluded, and so the numbers may be higher.

This also is only Inbound, not Outbound.

Beckman

On Mon, 28 Mar 2022, Denver Gingerich wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 27, 2022 at 07:08:01PM -0400, Peter Beckman wrote:
>> Why I'm Posting
>>
>> This is the 48th SMS outage since August 2015 that Vitelity has
>> experienced, and in most cases, I have been the first person to alert them
>> to a problem. They do not monitor inbound SMS, they just wait for a
>> customer complaint, and even then, I've been told "nobody else has opened a
>> ticket," as if multiple customers need to complain before they take an
>> outage seriously.
>
> I wasn't aware that people used Vitelity SMS for anything serious.  My
> few months of experience with them suggested that they didn't even
> support all ASCII characters (for example, '<' and '>' were simply
> replaced with spaces, at least when using XMPP), and their service
> silently failed to deliver SMS on a regular basis.  I assumed they didn't
> see SMS as a production feature for those reasons (and a few others) so
> stopped using it fairly soon after.
>
> Has their service improved recently on other metrics?  For example, do they
support UTF-8 now?
>
> Denver
> https://jmp.chat/
>

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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                https://www.angryox.com/
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