What’s the industry average for an SMS response from a common short code (CSC)? About 9 seconds, according to a new study from Keynote Competitive Research.

The fastest CSC responded in less than 6 seconds, while the slowest averaged more than 19 seconds.

The study also found that reliability and variability issues persist. Several short codes had more than 10 hours of outage, while one reported more than 50 hours. In addition, response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day; one CSC showed a 60% peak-period slowdown every day.

In general, CDMA carriers had slower send times than GSM carriers, and for some short codes, response time was more than twice as slow via one carrier compared to another, according to Keynote.

Short codes have increased in popularity, but until now, there hasn’t been much visibility in terms of how well the codes are performing, according to Nisheeth Mohan, product manager of mobile at Keynote. The study ran throughout the month of May. “The goal is to inform the industry,” providing visibility into the end-user performance of short codes, he said.

The study, which compared the round-trip delivery time and average availability of SMS messages sent to 24 popular short codes, found that CBS and Coca-Cola rank first in overall reliability, while Obopay ranks first in overall responsiveness. Measurements were taken from New York and San Francisco over AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless networks during the 4-week period.