Test whether SMS are received by customers

Question

We send SMS to customers in multiple countries (several countries in Europe, US, Australia). Our customers use different mobile networks in their respective countries.

How can we test that our SMS sending partners can actually deliver messages to the networks our customers use?

We are using Simtest.it but we would like an alternative, as we have the problem that we never know who to blame when SMS aren't received in our test setup: did our partners screw up or is it a Simtest.it problem?

Clarification: The type of service I'm looking for is someone having separate mobile phones connected to computers in all my target countries. The service gives me these telephone numbers, I send an SMS there (possibly including some special token to identify the sender) and I get a report what SMS were received on what telephone number at what time.

Delivery notifications for arbitrary recipients (what Twilio is offering) are a different thing. We already get those from most of our SMS partners, and if you believe all of them you might just as well believe in Santa Claus. They may be reliable if you only send via Twilio to the US, but as soon as you go abroad all bets are off.

Answer 1

According to my co-worker who tested an SMS feature recently, there is a Twilio API for getting the status of the text for short code phone numbers that you can use to get delivery confirmation of texts sent w/ Twilio. This is likely the same thing Mercfh was thinking about.

He does not believe that the cellular venders have APIs to report back delivery.

He also mentioned that there was a Google Voice API for SMS text testing that is no longer supported.

I recognize this isn't an ideal answer (hearsay + no clear recommendation), but it gives you a few more directions to investigate (or not), and maybe it will encourage someone more knowledgable to post something better :-)

Answer 2

We've used Twilio before and it works pretty well, however I do not think it is free but very cheap (cents per text message). So that might be worth trying.

Answer 3

I was also looking for a tool like this and couldn't find one anywhere so I built something for this purpose.

I'm not sure if it suits your needs but I thought I would share it in case it helps anyone. It's "quick and dirty" but it should do the trick for some uses.

It does use Twilio as the SMS provider but it should still provide reliable test results since the messages still need to leave Twilio's infrastructure and traverse the SMS network.

SMS-Scope