Text

aardvaak

Why is it that sometimes I recieve a text 10-12 hours after it was sent even though my phone is on 24/7?

ARandomMiser

That happens to my partner as well. She can send a text but it does not arrive for several hours. So if anyone knows I would be interested as well - I just assumed that it got queued up somewhere.

DoaM

@OP ... which network are you on? Or are the delayed texts all from phones on the same (different to you) network?

wongataa

aardvaak wrote: »

Why is it that sometimes I recieve a text 10-12 hours after it was sent even though my phone is on 24/7?

Because SMS is not guaranteed to be a quick service. It usually is but messages can get delayed. This can happen if there is congestion on the network or if there are some technical issues with the network.

fwor

ARandomMiser wrote: »

I just assumed that it got queued up somewhere.

It's a reasonable assumption, but the underlying reason is probably either network maintenance activity or misconfiguration of network nodes.

The background to SMS is actually quite complex, and it started life essentially as a maintenance tool. AFAIK it still has to share bandwidth with the messages that mobile phone nodes exchange with each other for traffic management, billing and other important management processes. So it's possible that SMS content may be held/queued while "more important" network traffic dominates.

It also typically has a slightly odd retry algorithm which in some respects is historical. It involves the repeated doubling of the time between retries, and was designed to reduce network load due to failed retries for phones which were out of range or switched off. It's probably not so appropriate now that most mobile phones are switched on 24 hours a day and network coverage is much greater. But it does mean that if your phone happens to hit a coverage blackspot and be out of touch for more than a short while, you may have to wait an unexpectedly long time for the next retry.

[Deleted User]

Hi,

this used to happen to me, a mate would send me an imessage, but because I was only on mms, I wouldn't get it for hours.

aardvaak

doam wrote: »

@op ... Which network are you on? Or are the delayed texts all from phones on the same (different to you) network?

o2.....................