SMS between providers

Should text messaging work between phones on different provider companies? I'm on Cingular and sent a message to someone on Sprint. It went OK and he got it OK. When he went to send a reply, I got the reply but on his end it said that it failed. So he tried it again several times and I ended up with 5 copies on my phone. No harm, but I wonder why he got an error message when it really worked OK.

this should work just fine. i send sms all the time to friends and family, and we all have different companies, and we never have problems. nothing is 100% effective, so SMS should be more like 98% effective, in my opinion. probably you just had some bad luck and wound up in that 2% section!

Its because Sprint PCS is horrible. I have Virgin Mobile right now and I rarely ever send a successful SMS from home--and keep in mind I'm in the Los Angeles area.