New Year's Eve SMS Volume and Waiting Times

Happy new Year 2010 to all of you! And not only to you as in Germany, like in many other places around the world it's custom to send a new year message to friends and family by SMS or give them a call right after midnight. Bitcom estimates that in Germany, 300 million SMS messages are sent over the change of the year. Compared to the average of 80 million messages a day, that's quite a spike, which is, from experience, highly concentrated over the first few hours of the day.

So I wondered how long it takes for messages to be delivered during such an extraordinary traffic peak? Between 10 minutes past midnight and 40 minutes past midnight I sent four messages from a 3G phone to a 2G phone. All messages were immediately accepted my the SMSC. The delivery was then deferred for some time. The first messages was delivered within 10 minutes, the following two in about 25 minutes and the fourth took again a bit longer to be delivered. It look like the fireworks takes precedence. So yes, the SMS Service Centers must have been quite busy :-)

Comments

[denisa firicel]

hi! I saw that you are pretty passionate about wireless and everything related to it, cuz I am following your blog for some time now. I was wandering if you ever heard about a phenomenon like the following: MS1 starts a MO call to MS2. From the moment MS2 starts to ring in MS1 you can hear the called party speaking...in fact you can hear everything what is spoken in that room even though MS2 did not hit the answer key and the call was not actually established. I have saw this phenomenon today but so far i never read anything about it..and I can not take any logs of the mobile used (an HP phone) because i dont know if it is supported by TEMPS.

[mobilesociety]

Hi Denisa,

no, I have never experienced that in practice before. I can remember one instance but in this case the phone was in the pocket of someone and I assume it was not locked and the call accept button was pressed by the persons movements.

Kind regards,
Martin