Whilst there will always be a place for the cheapest services ever in every market place whether it the bloke at the set of traffic lights who kinds of cleans/smears your windscreen with something fluid, take away restaurants on the side of the road somewhere a long way from somewhere else or an SMS service, I put it to you that not all SMS services are created equally.
From the providers such as ourselves who deal directly with the networks all the way down to those providers who have a single connection with a Telco that even the locals where the Telco is based have never heard of them, and everyone in between!
I know what you’re thinking, but I really don’t have anything against cheap and cheerful services, or cheap and nasty services for that matter, just as long as the companies using these services understand that what they are getting are not necessarily the same as other services offered in the market place. I have no qualms admitting that when potential customers ask me for pricing so low that I may as well be paying them for sending messages through our gateway I’m offended, both personally and professionally – professionally because I must have missed that element of our site which gives people the impression that we are prepared to compare the quality of our products and services to the cheapest of the cheap in everyway, and personally because they must be assuming that I am without any moral substance that I am prepared to sell a product I know most likely will only work sometimes, rather than all of the time.
Let’s get something straight, this is not about how good any of these products are when they are working, because let face it, when it works it works and all services are on par. The Lipmann’s test is when the service is broken. How long before it’s resolved? How long before I can speak to someone? How many times do I have to contact them before they give me an answer? Do they appreciate your pain in having the service not working when you need to contact your customers? For what ever reason are you going to be offered the same level of quality, support and timely response as you will with a locally routed service and if you’re the kind of person that demands a quality service, then you’re going to have to pay a premium for that service.
If quality is not your only concern, and price is a factor that you just can’t ignore then go for an offshore route by all means, please, but understand that not all offshore SMS services are created equal either.
I guess you are looking at a couple of types of offshore services, those who use well known and large Telco’s like Sprint, Vodafone and O2 for example, and those that use networks so small, that the only people who have heard of them work for them or have a family member that does.
The problem with these services is that the networks that are used to pass the messages through generally have interconnect agreements which means that application to consumer messaging will be block, and does get block – i.e. web based SMS services.
A recent example of this would be Telstra blocked messages from a number of providers from passing through which effected companies like Tri-Tel from successfully sending outbound messages.
If you are going to take the opinion that you don’t see the value in paying for a locally based service, then look at the offshore route, but do yourself the favour and ask them which countries are they routing their messages to, and through which networks? In most cases the difference in cost per message will be less than a couple of cents and out of that you will not only get a more reliable service, but a much improved delivery success rate meaning that you are not paying for lost messages.
Of course there are a number of other reasons why going locally is the best option, but I’ll leave that for another day and another post.
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