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Comment by GBond | Hacker News Reader

Sorry - a bit OT but... who carries pagers anymore let alone startups?

In addition to the reasons already mentioned, they are necessary in certain secure environments (DOD closed areas and prisons, for instance) where only receive-only devices are permitted.

Engineers at Amazon. Seriously.

Last time I checked, which was awhile ago, Blackberry was the only non-pager that could guarantee delivery within a known time-frame. You can't run server alerts over SMS, since it might take an hour (I've heard of a 12 hour delay around New Year's), or it might not be delivered at all.

Seems like there might be a market here for an app which acknowledged receipt and publication of a message to the target's phone, coupled with a service which escalated to a phone call to the target if it times out waiting for the acknowledgement.

Urban Airship does do some sort of messaging thing. But, yea, agreed.

I think the guarantee is the tough part; you have to own the hardware and have at least some control over the infrastructure.

Anyway, I find Georgie's comment fascinating. Sounds like there's a way to guarantee SMS delivery, though. From Wikipedia on SMS/SS7[1]:

> Therefore, it is possible to avoid delays and message losses, offering full delivery guarantees of messages and optimized routing. This model is particularly efficient when used in mission-critical messaging and SMS used in corporate communications.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#SMS_gateway_providers

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