Update: Appears to be working fine now If you're a publisher who has set up a Google SMS Channel, it's likely that you already know about this: Google has been having problems delivering SMS / text alerts since the launch. Some messages aren't being picked up from the RSS feeds, they're being delivered as much as a day late, or aren't being delivered at all. We've faced these issues with the channel we had set up, and readers have SMSed us regarding undelivered messages (they've had to "poke" for updates), not just from the MediaNama channel, but also from Google News. It's likely that the problem is with the overburdened SMS Center (SMSC), which routes all the SMS traffic on an operators network. Below is a simple diagram of how SMS' are sent and received in an operator network, for both pull and push services. SMSCs can be both mobile operator managed, or set up by a third party. Assuming around 300 million SMS being delivered in India a day, that's an average of around 3470 SMS being sent per second in India; some of the SMSCs of larger operators like Airtel, Idea and Vodafone will be handling substantially more traffic, and the number will obviously be higher for the daytime hours. As Thejo had mentioned in response to my comment on his blog, availability of bandwidth on the SMSC is huge issue, "one that will determine whether the service is going to do well." But the opportunity The flexibility…
