Maybe that's just your network? I haven't had any problems.
Nope, a bunch of different networks. It happens to E. and she's on a different network, for starters.
Nothing that Hamm's and raisins can't fix.
The days when SMS service revenue margin was 70ish % are gone now they're bundled and everyone uses WhatsApp or, i dunno, steganographic porn over Open Whisper Systems' latest, and it's not a priority any more although volume is still rising.
Meanwhile, data volumes keep rising at a 40-50% clip, and that's what actually pays the payroll. And if you don't have voice service, you're not a mobile operator, so that gets at least some attention. (Also, network T is very proud of having a lot of people on HD voice.)
I had no idea steganographic porn was such a bandwidth hog.
It's not bandwidth that's the problem - we've got plenty to push your steg porn/whatsapp/cat videos over the 4G data net, it's that no bugger cares enough to deploy more SMS store-and-forward capacity because there's no money in it.
I would never have guessed 10 years ago that we would regress from open/semi-open IP based text communication to SMS/MMS.
That's because with SMS there's very little chance you'll accidentally forward a link to your steg pron.
Hey, there's always WhatsApp, Apple's messenger (which is XMPP under the bonnet), etc.
Makes you long for the days when steg pron was just good old stegosaurus porn.
I also started using email on my cell phone for several years before I started texting.
16: So why are you texting? I mean, my mom texts, but she's about 40 years older than you.
I spent the morning texting sarcastic emojis to my contractor. This may have shown poor judgment.
Does steganographic porn hide the porn in an apparently innocuous clear message, or conceal notes about the position of the enemy forces in a video of some wretched teenager taking her kit off?
22: the message is concealed in the, uh, other message.
the days when steg pron was just good old stegosaurus porn.
BACK IN MY DAY WE DIDN'T NEED PRON! WE SIMPLY FROLICKED AND MADE LOVE THE WAY NATURE INTENDED!
I would love to know how nature intended stegosauri to make love, because I can't for the life of me work out how they managed.
The canonical answer is "Very very carefully."
20: I can't tell if 20 is reinforcing my belief that my generation doesn't use any communications technology at all, because its major communications priority is to be fucking left alone for the few scant minutes each day that aren't booked up by work and school and obligatory television watching and shit. Perhaps not.
I've recently had instances where texts didn't come through for 7 hours, which caused some difficulty with my GF, who thought I was ignoring her. Irritating.
I haven't noticed it getting worse recently, but it's not at all uncommon for texts to not turn up for over a day.
31. That's happened to me rarely but regularly for 20 years. Live with it.
I've had that happen with my bank when sending me a temporary PIN for logins. Once I even called the bank's security hotline thinking I had been hacked.
The thing I want to know is why every single online vendor sends email receipts nearly instantly (within a few minutes at most), except for Apple/iTunes, which always emails receipts for things I buy 3-5 days after I buy them.
It's because the email has to be designed in California.
Because they wait to see if you order more things to aggregate the transactions and save on merchant fees.
The nice thing about finding out a text didn't go through is that you can tell yourself that that person who you really wanted to text you *did* text you, but the aether swallowed it.
28
I believe one can find videos of imagined ways dinosaurs had sex. It's SCIENCE, not pr0n!
One of the boulders I've been rolling up a hill is trying to convince telecommunications companies that they need to shell out for better public warning systems. Those that exist around here are based on SMS text messages. That's not going to be good enough if there is a tsunami on the way, and you need to get warnings out to the population. For one thing, if you send out 50,000 text messages at one time, they are all going to pile up in the router and those texts aren't going to get delivered until hours later.
There are better systems available, but actually getting them paid for is the tough nut to crack.
Why would 50,000 text messages take that long? I'm not at all aware of how those systems work, but in terms of bytes, 50,000 text messages are probably smaller than a 30 second video of a dinosaur having sex with a car.
In terms of bytes, sure its not big, but its not a single big message to be transferred, or even one message that gets broadcast to 50,000 simultaneous receivers. Its 50,000 individual copies of a message getting routed to 50,000 different phones. And if you overload the routing process, it gets backed up.
It also a problem that, if you impending disaster is on the west side, you can't warn the people just on the west side. You are going to waste a lot of time (and bug a lot of people) sending warnings to the east side as well. Sending messages to phones just on a specific tower set of towers isn't an option, absent an additional layer of expensive technology.
40--the texts notifying us about the potential shooter on campus routinely arrive hours after the all clear...
Maybe we just have a better network? When that guy was calling in bomb threats, I got so many texts so quickly that I turned off the warnings.
You may have been getting messages through a cell broadcast system, which isn't SMS. Cell broadcast allows emergency managers to send one message to 50,000 people all at once, instead of the 50,000 individual messages. So it doesn't get all congested.
I had to specifically sign up for it. It wasn't coming to everyone in the area or anything. I got them even when I was away from campus.
Probably better network infrastructure, then. Or maybe they bought one of those boxes that throttles the messages to the optimum rate for not clogging up the network while maximizing throughput.
This might be of interest to programmers, people in the Bay Area, and people interested in foster care and social justice. Half the Mineshaft, basically.