CTIA: Eighty percent of SMS users report dropped texts, Telcordia says

While there’s not exactly customer uproar about dropped text messages, 82% of respondents to a survey from vendor Telcordia said they’d suffered a drop SMS or MMS message in the past 12 months.

Telcordia first started talking about the survey at Mobile World Congress and announced the results at this week’s CTIA show. The respondents represented mobile users in more than 75 countries.

The main problem, Telcordia contends, is the effect of number portability amplified across multiple SMS aggregators or hubs that may not have access to the same data about number changes that mobile operators have themselves, said Joel Fisher, vice president of marketing-interconnection solutions for Telcordia. The number is also significant due to the sheer number of text messages sent each year – nearly six trillion mobile messages were sent in 2010 alone, according to Ovum.

Telcordia’s interest in these numbers isn’t hypothetical, of course. The vendor administers industry directories and registries that service providers and aggregators use to deliver voice and data services, including SMS.

Service providers typically have access to number portability changes within their network, obviously, as well as on a bilateral basis with other carriers. But SMS aggregators and hub providers have less access to such up-to-date data, Fisher said.

Telcordia has been building a data solution to directly address this mobile ID problem, Fisher said. Telcordia will roll out one of the first available regional implementations of the data product, targeting Mexico and Latin America, later this spring.