In December 2011 ANACOM carried out an assessment of the quality of the short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) provided by operators OPTIMUS, TMN and Vodafone Portugal, by analysing the technical parameters which reflect the perception of quality from the consumer standpoint.
The study relies on field tests performed from the user’s standpoint, by using an automatic measurement system that reflects the several features affecting the quality of the services, namely: service accessibility, message delivery rate and time, variation of the indicators throughout the day. Overall, 15 592 test messages were sent, amounting to approximately 72 hours of measurements.
The global results obtained for each operator have a maximum error below 1.2 per cent for the “service accessibility and message delivery rate” indicators, and below 1.6 seconds for the “message delivery time” indicator, for a 95% confidence level.
The mobile communications systems present a very good SMS messaging performance, since the operators provide full accessibility to the service and deliver all messages sent, with average times below seven seconds, both on business days and at weekends.
During weekends operators have a very good performance in MMS messaging, with delivery rates above 98.7% and average delivery times below 38.6 seconds. On business days, TMN and VODAFONE maintain their performance levels while OPTIMUS suffers a decline to levels that are still acceptable, particularly with regard to the message delivery rate.
