Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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This may not be unique to XMPP...I use regular Google Hangouts with my fiancee (also on stock Google Hangouts) and have found that occasionally messages to my fiancee get to her hours later or not at all. Apparently the Hangouts team doesn't consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.

I think people don't realize just how unreliable the major messaging networks are. There was a Reddit thread a year or so ago where some folks who worked in the telecom industry said that they shoot for a 98% delivery rate with SMS, i.e. one in every 50 SMS messages will just get lost. I've personally experienced arriving at a friends' house, sending them a text to let them know I'm there, waiting 10 minutes, knocking on the door, and then 20 minutes later, while I'm in the car with them, my own text message finally arrives.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one experiencing this Hangouts problem [0]. The lady friend thinks I'm nuts.

Speaking of SMS, when I lived in the American Southeast, I occasionally had SMS messages from friends be delivered months late.

Neither Hangouts nor SMS are the messaging systems of the future. :P If Signal (nee TextSecure) doesn't gain traction, maybe we need a super-sexy frontend over top of email.

[0] Looks like we were concurrently writing up our experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267147

What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 - 2 minutes).

Your bank is using a bad SMS service provider. With a SS7 uplink (versus a cheap SMPP connection), it should arrive within seconds, with a delivery report for the sender, if desired.

Hmm.. we get it within a few minutes.

My wife and I have gone back to emailing each other (from our phones) because we have periodic issues with massively delayed text messages (e.g. ~7PM "ETA?", reply "30 minutes", delivery of that reply ~1:30AM). Some of that's likely due to flakiness of her (old, but has a keyboard!) phone, but regardless of that email moves right through.

Its not XMPP that's the problem, its Google Hangouts. Google Talk didn't drop messages (and its the one using XMPP).

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