Perhaps this has something to do with why Americans haven't taken to SMS messaging. My goodness.

My initial tendency would be to blame this on the mish mash of different technical standards in use in the US. One might expect SMS interoperability between networks to be the problem, whereas in Europe (where everyone uses GSM) things might be easier. (However, SMS interoperability should require only a small amount of competently written code, I would have thought). However, what is really curious is that delivery rates for same network messages seem to be just as bad as to other networks, and that T-Mobile, which uses GSM and should be able to gain some sort of advantage from the experience of Europe, appears to be doing worse than almost any other operator.

Perhaps this is just general shodiness. That said, I would like to see the equivalent delivery rates for European networks when they were delivering similar numbers of messages.