Another New Year, More SMS Delivery Problems

from the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do dept

Wed, Jan 3rd 2007 8:57am — Carlo Longino

While the mobile industry moves forward with all sorts of fancy new networks and products, some of the old stuff might still need some work. For instance, the delivery of SMS messages can be a problem, particularly when lots of people are sending them -- leading to stories at the beginning of every year about delayed or missing New Year's greetings. This year, British operator O2 appears to be the laughing stock. It sent out a message encouraging its subscribers to send their Happy New Year messages early, so they wouldn't get caught in the midnight rush -- only for that promotional message to get delayed by several hours. Perhaps the episode will illustrate to O2 that rather than only try to spread out the burden of high-volume events over a longer timeframe, it needs to increase its capacity as well.

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Anonymous Coward, 3 Jan 2007 @ 9:21am

Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween to all TechDirt Readers!
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chris (profile), 3 Jan 2007 @ 9:51am

funny, it hit verizon too
i tried to call my mom (in the states and using verizon) and the circuits were busy, so i sent SMS messages instead.

she ended up calling me on my VOIP phone instead.
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brad, 3 Jan 2007 @ 10:06am

i got the same new years greetings from friends 4 times each on tmobile
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Annoying Bastard, 3 Jan 2007 @ 10:08am

Mike...
Carlo's showing his knack for reposting your old threads again.

I think the first line of this thread clearly displays the quality of Carlo's work.

"While the mobile industry moves forward with all sorts of fancy new networks and products, some of the old stuff might still need some work."

Brilliantly executed (for a 7th grader). :-P

Do you have any editorial review at Techdirt, or are your "correspondents" allowed to spew such vomit at will?

You know you could put a free classfied ad on Craiglist for a new writer, right?

SOAPBOX
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Alan, 3 Jan 2007 @ 10:25am

Re: Mike...
Mike, Techdirt doesn't need to review its correspondents, but its pretty easy to see that maybe they should start moderating the comments from people like you who have nothing better to do then point out other peoples mistakes...

Maybe your 1 1/2 inch penis has something to do with that.
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alan (again), 3 Jan 2007 @ 10:26am

Re: Re: Mike...
Mike or Annoying bastard... whoever the )(*&# you are....
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Wolff000, 3 Jan 2007 @ 11:20am

Re: Mike...
I'm sure your helpful advice will not go without being returned. Remeber friend karma is not just for hippies it works for everyone. Anyways I have had this problem with all my mobiles since I got one. It is why I hate sms and hardly ever use it. It makes more sense to me to call someone since I obvioulsy have a phone and thier phone #.
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Cleveland OH, 3 Jan 2007 @ 11:26am

Tmobile just sent too many
Somehow, I recieved above 5 copies of the same SMS messages from 12:00 am to about 4:00 am on my Tmobile phone. Good thing I have the SMS plan...ended up with over 32 duplicate messages
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misanthropic humanist, 3 Jan 2007 @ 11:40am

resource sharing agreements
Queueing/capacity theory is a bitch. To my knowledge the best you can get is a square law - which is an ugly obstacle in business. The networks could add massive new capacity that would be redundant for most of the time, just to handle the occasional peaks that happen once or twice a year for major events or emergencies. It wouldn't be economical.

This overlaps with three other debates, network neutrality, network integration (comon carriers) and private/free market vs state/national infrastructure. Because collectively the networks have enough capacity to handle huge peak traffic bursts, but one assumes they do not share out their resources properly. The story deals with the failure of one network, O2, but if the SMS networks were properly interoperable with rapid dynamic bandwidth purchasing ability in place for the networks to trade their pipes and resources the problem would vanish.

In other words, it's not necessarily the problem that there aren't enough resources out there to go round, but rather that the individual operators won't play nice with each other and cut off all their noses through mutual spite.
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Steve, 5 Jan 2007 @ 10:21am

Not Just SMS!
I'm a Sprint customer, and while I've never had this problem before, I got two voicemails from midnight on New Years' Eve at about 10am January 2nd. I was wondering why my parents hadn't called... and as it turns out, they did!
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