phones

This seems a bit off. Public payphones were what, 25¢/min? Now that they have been eliminated, the cash equivalent is a prepaid mobile service.

Public payphones had an infrastructure of phone booths that needed to be maintained, cleaned, and serviced. They consumed real estate.

Prepaid mobile service is a trivial deployment by comparison. I must maintain my own hardware. Yet my carrier charges 22¢/min in 2025. Comparable to the cost of public payphones.

If you sit in front of a PC with a big screen all day, smartphones are not a good way to do SMS. Rationale:

• you have to reach for a small screen & possibly tap around (enter PINs) to see the txt that just arrived
• smartphones have a huge attack surface; street-wise people do not put GSM chips in them
• to send a msg, you have to tap on a tiny keyboard (or fiddle with a dicey speech-to-text tool)
• (countless software freedom issues here… gammu does not work with smartphones because smartphones do not support a standard AT command protocol)

Theoretically, isn’t gammu or gnokii a smarter way of working? If you have a text terminal and gnu screen/tmux running, possibly with irssi, it would be a much more efficient workflow if SMS msgs would arrive in an irssi window just like an IRC channel so you can use your full size keyboard to enter an SMS.

Anyone doing this?

I got gammu working on an old dumb phone. Haven’t checked yet whether it can be integrated into irssi or bitlbee.

Possible snag: serial connections are possibly unreliable with Gammu. My USB→serial DCU-65 cable attached to a Sony Ericsson dumb phone chronically disconnects and reconnects to the PC. I wonder if using bluetooth instead would solve that.

The gammu and gnokii projects seem to be somewhat idling.. having been pushed aside due to smartphones. But it’s unjust and an artifact of tech wisdom fading in the population.

Sometimes an SMS msg reaches me a ½ day or full day late. Sometimes an SMS doesn’t reach me at all. I don’t use SMS often yet there are two recent instances where a friend sent an SMS that somewhat required a reply from me. When we met in person, they told me in detail what the SMS said and I said with 100% confidence that I did not receive the message. My friend was baffled in disbelief.. how can this be?

All my friends use smartphones for SMS but I will not. I use a feature phone (aka dumb phone). Smartphones can be updated for bug fixes but also because of that possibility I think there is a culture of writing sloppy code in the first place. The makers also want you to be forced to buy upgrades so bugs are good for that business. Smartphones are also a hell of a lot more complex and complexity is proportional to bugs. My dumb phone cannot be updated but it’s extremely simple & the tech is old thus proven.

Regardless, I did a brief dig & it seems the GSM network is to blame, not the phones. According to tech writer Adam Fendelman, “It's been shown that around 1-5 percent of all SMS messages are actually lost even when nothing is seemingly wrong”. Yikes. That is terrible.

This article is oriented toward the assholes who spam you with SMS ads. I almost closed the page but then saw a gem therein which gives this reason for some msgs being dropped:

“Flagged as Spam: Sometimes, carriers of recipients may flag your SMS as spam because of the use of certain language, words, or symbols that trigger spam filters.”

Shit; that sucks. So the same thing that makes email less reliable than fax is making SMS less reliable too. I know from my spam boxes with various email providers how crappy the spam/ham separators can be so I actually seek out & favor email providers who have no spam filtering. I had no idea that my SMS msgs would be subject to this. In principle, I might like SMS to be spam-filtered but only if the positives for spam are still made available either by emailing them or giving me a web portal.

Of course SMS can also fail for obvious reasons:

• your phone is off or out of range
• your phone lacks storage (dumb phones run out of memory)

but there is some machinery at work to ensure reattempts.

I am certain that my phone was not out of memory when my friend tried to SMS me. My phone shows me a msg: “incoming msg but memory full” when that happens.

Fendelman’s article also says “SMS is usually lower on the priority list than other traffic like voice.” And worse, there is often no error detection in place so apparently some networks don’t even know when a SMS msg is lost.

The lack of SMS reliability is why the old radio pagers from the 80s have not been completely mothballed. Some cities are wise enough to keep them around for ER docs and firefighters. What about the cities that have not? They just decided SMS is reliable enough for lives to depend on?

I want my 1980s pager back.