Laden with text messages
This morning, I found out that the word laden is nothing to do with the word load, which I always thought was the case. Apparently, it’s the past participle of the verb to lade, a word that I’ve never used in my 32 year existence.
Anyhow, this morning, I was laden with a slew of (three) text messages, arriving one after another. Two were sent by my brother from the US before his departure a week ago today; the other was sent by my friend Gordon whom, it transpires, left the US yesterday. Is there an SLA to which mobile companies must adhere with regard to the turnaround of texts? I’m sure that Ben and Gordon have paid for the messages, despite them all being useless to me due to their delay.
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No SLAs on text messages sadly. I’ve been told, by execs at several mobile companies, that they get about 91-92% of messages delivered within 10 seconds. On peak days – Valentine’s day, New Year’s Eve, England winning anything in sport (less predictable than the others for sure and probably not a capacity indicator in the USA) – that can fall to 50% or less. Text was never supposed to be use like this – it uses a signal channel rather than mainstream capacity. That’s also, though, why when the bombs went off in London, text was the fastest way through – the voice channels were overloaded, but text didn’t need an open circuit for the whole time, as it’s a neat async protocol and texts can just queue up until there’s room to send them.
Sms works on a store& forward protocol with a back-off algo., increasing the delay each time it can’t deliver. There are a variety of resons why an sms can’t get through.
Different operators and end users can expire messages too as it is parameter based, and as a sms spans multi-operators it gets more complicated.
Botttom line is be grateful when it arrives, just as you are when an envelope plops onto the carpet.
Betya don’t know why they are 160chars long.