One thing that hurts the SIC is the fact that you get random outages, while I understand for flavor, the fact that this can happen when a new player is trying to ask a question or establish them self only to be met with(to them) total silence is fairly discouraging. Especially when an outage can last quite a long time, with no warning.
What I'd propose instead is that messages on the SIC are 'corrupted' in some sort of way that it can't be confused with encryption, and perhaps the ability to pay to have your SIC upgraded to lessen, or remove the outage effects. I think it's fairly in theme to have a technology forced on you that you then have to upgrade if you don't want it to be really shoddy. Perhaps with frequent advertisements to do so.