Feedback from Airtel and message delivery times in Dar es Salaam
Before leaving Tanzania I passed through Dar es Salaam for meetings with Airtel and Vodacom. The main reason was to discuss messaging contracts for my project with the Earth Institute, but I couldn’t resist an opportunity to show marketing reps the data I’d just taken in Mwanza. They were more interested than I expected. Continue reading
With apologies to everyone. Originals here.
As I lay me down to sleep,
I pray to find good hotels, cheap. Continue reading
While working with SMS-based applications I’ve noticed an air of mystery around the issue of reliability. I hear colleagues say ambiguous things like “carriers consider SMS to be lower priority than voice”, or “SMS delivery isn’t guaranteed”. My personal experience has been that messages are almost always delivered quickly and correctly, but I’ve heard stories of hours-long delays, corrupt data, and occasionally messages that never arrive. Since I am working on two projects that depend on reliable SMS service — one involves field-based data collection and another employs SMS as a transport layer between computers — I’m curiuos about how factors such as network, location, and time of day impact message transmission. Continue reading
