Vodafone 3G issue in Wgtn area - outbound SMS not working.

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › Vodafone 3G issue in Wgtn area - outbound SMS not working.

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simon14

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#56357 26-Dec-2006 10:56

Expect the same on New Years....

cranz

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#56360 26-Dec-2006 11:42

sbiddle: If there was overloading on the network how come messages sent from the GSM network where going through and being deliverd instantly?

It was christmas day, think about all the pretty new 3G handsets the 10-14 year olds would have been given and connected to UMTS network. Then the mass messages they would try to send to tell their friends :P

Same thing happened Christmas when Vodafone Live was new, so many Vodafone Live handsets were sold no one could connect to Vodafone Live becauses every single person with a new phone was trying to use it

freitasm

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#56361 26-Dec-2006 11:49

cranz: It was christmas day, think about all the pretty new 3G handsets the 10-14 year olds would have been given and connected to UMTS network. Then the mass messages they would try to send to tell their friends :P

What happened to the old 99.9999% uptime on telephony networks? What happened to "resiliency" as one of the characteristics of a network?

Resilience is the ability of the network to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation.

I come from an era where telephony operators were proud of having their networks up to 99.99999%. It seems the move from an analogue to a digital network and from that to an IP based network have reduced the expectations from people?

freitasm

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#56362 26-Dec-2006 11:56

Basically, my point is why find excuses for something as simple as to meet consumers' expectations?

There are definitions of workload, expectations, definitions of network characteristics. These are studied, engineered, tested, modeled, and still a network the size of Vodafone's fail on a thing such as this?

I am pretty sure Vodafone would find good network engineers within the company itself that understand the concepts of Busy Hour and Saturation. Applying this knowledge would prevent a lot.

It looks like marketing and sales people these days are more interested in funky ads on TV than reliability.

sbiddle

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#56365 26-Dec-2006 13:05

cranz:
sbiddle: If there was overloading on the network how come messages sent from the GSM network where going through and being deliverd instantly?

It was christmas day, think about all the pretty new 3G handsets the 10-14 year olds would have been given and connected to UMTS network. Then the mass messages they would try to send to tell their friends :P

This doesn't explain the fact Vodafone's UMTS network has close to triple the voice capacity of the existing GSM network and as I understand it both networks share the same SMSC flatform.

It sounds to me as if their was yet another technical issue with the UMTS network and nothing to do with overloading. Vodafone have a very well engineered network that can easily cope with extra load - being unable to send an SMS on the 3G network for over 14 hours is not a simple case of overloading. I would put money on the fact there were nowhere as many SMS's sent on Xmas day as there were early on during the free TXT weekends.

cranz

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#56375 26-Dec-2006 15:32

I'm not denying for a second that Vodafone isn't without its share of network issues (especially on IP platforms) and you are correct to say that the SMSC are exactly the same, but if there are to many channels being used on a base station and you try to send a txt, it will say message sending failed.

Wellington was also worsely affected by this than Auckland was, there was a transmission issue in Wellington CBD that would have added to the drama

johnr

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#56376 26-Dec-2006 16:05

There are the same SMSC's as before but there are now also 2 SMSR's

Samsung

Shop now on Samsung phones, tablets, TVs and more (affiliate link).

juha

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#56379 26-Dec-2006 16:33

Was SMS ever deemed to be reliable? From the Wikipedia page:

Message delivery is best effort, so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient and delay or complete loss of a message is not uncommon, particularly when sending between networks. Users may choose to request delivery reports, which can provide positive confirmation that the message has reached the intended recipient, but notifications for failed deliveries are unreliable at best.

Amazing, isn't it, that SMS costs so much for customers then...

Juha

freitasm

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#56388 26-Dec-2006 20:57

No, they are not 100%. For example the receiver handset could be off for a long period of time, out of coverage, etc, so there's no way for the sender to know for sure when the message was received. But this is the medium - offline instead of an instant result of a voice conversation.

Saying te service is "Best effort" delivery is not a way to justify a a 12 hour fault affecting people North and South in the country...

sbiddle

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#56389 26-Dec-2006 21:01

freitasm: No, they are not 100%. For example the receiver handset could be off for a long period of time, out of coverage, etc, so there's no way for the sender to know for sure when the message was received. But this is the medium - offline instead of an instant result of a voice conversation.

If Vodafone enabled SMS delivery notification the sender could get a reply sms notification of a) sms being delivered to the destination handset and b) sms being read on the destination handset.

The problem with this is that it triples the amount of SMS traffic generated which is why they obviously don't have it.

One of the "free" foreign SMSC's that could be access a few years ago had this enabled and it was a cool feature as you knew when a message had been delivered and read. Vodafone had delivery notifications enabled on it's MMSC for around a year or so after it launched MMS.

johnr

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#56391 26-Dec-2006 21:19

MMS deliverly notifiction is still active on the MMSCs but the A and B party need this turned on

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