engadget.com — It probably doesn't come as much of a shock to you that plenty of texting goes down midnight-ish tonight, and naturally the carriers are gearing up for just such an onslaught. One study shows however shows 70% of people who send messages at midnight experience a delay in delivery and suggests using IM or email from your phone instead if you can.
Dec 31, 2007 View in Crawl 4
pdangelo22Jan 1, 2008
Why this COULD be bad:Ex-Girlfriend / Casual Acquaintance: "Happy new year, i'm drunk and i want a shag!"Me (tomorrow morning): NOOOO!!!!
endlessoulJan 1, 2008
Was there some reason you posted that twice?
marmotJan 1, 2008
The thing with voice is that it maintains a constant traffic channel. Even though there is much more data involved in a voice call as compared with an SMS, the amount of processing required for that voice data is very low -- essentially, it's circuit switched data, and phone companies are very good at handling that efficiently.SMS is very different from voice. With SMS, it's not the bandwidth that's expensive -- the expensive part is all of the backend processing required to process each message. Basically, the backend processing for each SMS message is similar to that required for an entire voice call.SMS is basically packet switched data with store/forward/retry, and per-transaction billing. Each message must be processed individually, and each SMS involves about the same amount of processing as an entire voice call requires. For each SMS, two billing events must be generated (for both originating and receiving the SMS), and the SMSC must determine where to route each SMS individually. The handset must then be located (whether local or roaming). If the SMS isn't delivered right away, it must be stored for later retrieval (along with millions of other messages). Individually, that may not involve a lot of work, but consider than an SMSC may be processing tens or hundreds of thousands of messages simultaneously--each one of these requiring the same amount of backend processing as an entire voice call.As for why it costs as much as it does -- well, part of it is that SMS is fairly expensive to operate. The other part of it is that the market is obviously willing to pay for it (even if you aren't), and phone companies are not known for leaving money on the table.
marmotJan 1, 2008
It's not the raw data that's expensive -- it's all of the associated work involved for each packet. The actual transmission of data involved with SMS is minimal. What you're paying for is all of the backend work that is required to accept / store / forward / retry each SMS message individually. When you use wireless data (e.g. WAP browsing), the network does not individually store each packet -- the only processing involved is in IP networking, and in passing the wireless data session between the data "call" and the IP network. If data packets are lost en route, they are simply resent by the far end (e.g. the network itself doesn't need to store them for any length of time). This does not require significant database access -- other than checking to make sure the user has data networking, most of the work is in establishing the data session and closing it when completed. With SMS, each message must be processed stored / forwarded individually. This processing includes generating a billing event when the message is sent, and another when it is received. The sender and recipient may have special features set up on their profiles that require extra processing and database lookups for each message (e.g. checking a whitelist / blacklist). The recipient may be roaming, which means another database lookup (to locate the recipient). If the message is not received on its first delivery attempt, it must be stored and retried periodically, sometimes for several days -- doing that efficiently with many millions of stored messages for millions of subscribers is more difficult than you might think. Basically SMS is expensive because it involves a lot more work than passing packets around. Also, it's expensive because enough people are willing to pay what carriers are asking. Carriers are in the business of making money after all, and if they can do so hand over fist, so be it.
eupingJan 3, 2008
The moral of this story is that instead of texting, you should just shoot guns in the air..