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

[Denver Gingerich]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2022 at 10:32:05PM -0400, Peter Beckman wrote:
> My first evidence that UTF-8 was supported was January 13, 2017.

Using which of the methods that Vitelity provides (XMPP, email, other?)?

> There are weird issues with Vitelity, such as odd length limits to SMS
> messages, but we worked around them. SMS is reliable enough,

I'm not sure what your metrics are for "reliable enough", but given the below chart, I don't think it would meet my bar. :)

> 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.
[...]
> 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.

Given the lack of proper delivery receipts with most North American carriers, my assumption then would be that these "failed%" messages are all silent failures (i.e. the sender (on some random network) never knew that your Vitelity number didn't get their SMS).

I can see how Vitelity's cost for SMS might encourage some use cases where reliability requirements are low, but especially since many (most?) carriers of this nature provide $0 incoming SMS, it's hard for me to see a good reason to use Vitelity for inbound.  Perhaps your use case involves a lot of outbound too, though.

Denver
https://jmp.chat/