A new study claims that the industry average for an SMS text message response from a common short code was approximately 9 seconds.

The fastest common short code responded in less than 6 seconds and the slowest averaged more than 19 seconds, according to Keynote Systems Inc.'s Keynote Competitive Research's first common short code study.

"Absolutely, speed is critical," said Nisheeth Mohan, product manager of mobile at Keynote, San Mateo, CA. "For a lot of transactions with common short codes customers pay a premium and if they don't receive a response in a desirable amount of time, it could have a negative response and drive away the consumer from the service."

The Keynote Common Short Code Study compares the round-trip delivery time and average availability of SMS messages sent to 24 top common short codes.

Per the study, many common short codes monitored had reliability issues. Some reported more than 10 hours of outage and one more than 50.

Moreover, response times for some common short codes fell during the busiest time of day. One common short code had a 60 percent peak-period slow slowdown each day, indicating a capacity problem.

Wireless carriers can affect the overall performance of common short codes. CDMA carriers, for example, had slower send times than GSM carriers.

CBS (short code 99888) and Coca-Cola (2653) were ranked No. 1 in terms of overall reliability, with a Keynote score of 1000. This implies that CBS and Coca-Cola are always available and report the minimum number of outage hours.

Chase (24273) had a 991 score and The New York Times (698698) and Obopay (62729) tied at 988 in overall reliability.

Obopay topped in overall responsiveness, with a 984 score. It was measured on average performance, carrier consistency, performance variability and load-handling capability.

Wells Fargo (93557) was in second place at 938, followed by the New York Times' 924 score. Thumbplay (48000) got an 895 score and Chase 891 for overall responsiveness.

Delivery of a message is not dependent on any one factor, Mr. Mohan said. It depends on the network's and the aggregator's performance as well as the content provider which sends the response.

"The carrier kind of becomes irrelevant because if a carrier is down, it could be down for all the short codes and equally impact all the short codes," Mr. Mohan said.

"Our rankings indicate how well the content provider/aggregator combination is working," he said. "The aggregator is the one who routes the message from the content provider to the gateway.

"Different content providers have different back-end servers which process the request differently. Another factor is how well the content provider can handle load."

Common short codes are four- to six-digit numeric codes to which consumers can send an SMS text message for viewing or buying mobile content and voting for a television contest or poll. The Common Short Code Administration leases common short codes to companies.

Among the 24 common short codes measured were also brands such as 4Info, CNBC, Cosmopolitan, Elle Girl, Fandango, Flycell, Google, NBC, Paypal, Pepsi, Reuters, Seventeen, Starbucks, Universal Music Group, UPS, USA Today, The Weather Channel and Yahoo.

The study was conducted using the Keynote Mobile Application Perspective, a software-as-a-service product. Keynote sent SMS messages to the 24 common short code addresses every hour for four weeks.

Keynote took measurements from New York and San Francisco over AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile during the tracking period. The roundtrip delivery time was calculated to reflect the end-user experience, according to the company.

Mr. Mohan was surprised by a couple of findings in the study.

"This was a fairly simple transaction - just a simple HELP message - and the variability that we saw shows a three-times factor, which is huge," he said. "Another one is the availability and the reliability. There was a significant number of outage hours."