Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Possible cure for lost text messages due to bottleneck?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 08:44:52 -0400

Marcel...I thought this article below raised some interesting points.

>A Roadmap to Interactive ARPU
>– “P2P is the killer sector,” says Proteus CEO McQuown –
>By  Jeremy Geelan

The comments about lost SMS texts got my old grey cells moving.

>To maximize resources, says McQuown, queue times need
>adjusting so that no SMS messages get lost, and the whole protocol for
short
>service needs to be tightened. At the engineering level, there is at
present a
>very thin bottleneck – 200 messages per second per carrier – it’s not like
the
>Internet where there are a gazillion nodes.

>SMS will clearly not be as compelling a form of communication unless and
until
>you can be 100% sure that an SMS message is actually going to be received.
200
>messages a second is not enough, and in Europe 2,000 per second has been
achieved
>already. “The software and the hardware behind SMS is what’s wrong,”
McQuown
>observes.

The above raises some fair points. I believe text messages are sometimes
not delivered
because of bottleneck. But if, by implication, the article suggests queuing
is a network operator's
Achilles tendon and largely difficult to determine, it does not raise
confidence about the skill of an
operator nor the commercial awareness and, equally, the commercial
astuteness of the ROI plan.

Quantifying the likelihood of queuing , as I understood it to be, arises
from determining the peak period of 
traffic flow against a range of events. For instance, - national
/international events, FA Cup/ World Cup
/ Olympics etc or business hours peak traffic or holidays periods
(Christmas etc) and the circuits required
to be in place to copy with such events. Would not an ROI plan take account
of this from forecast peaks and
troughs over x-number of years to determine investment against the likely
returns?

In GSM, the standards prescribe the methods for acknowledgement for
messages sent and messages
received. If one part of the acknowledgement fails the standards are not
clear whether that failure should
or could be treated to reconciliation before progressing the call record of
an attempt to the billing computer
and adding a charge to a subscriber's account. 

One could view this from a less desirable angle and ask how many
subscribers' are charged for SMS text
messages that are not received? With monthly subscriber accounts users' get
their bills after 30 days. How
many users know which message was not received that appears on their bills?
How many are prepared to
complain to operators' of one off 4p, 10p, 14p, 27p (or the equivalent Cent
value) charges?   With prepaid,
subscribers' do not receive bills at all - try working that one out?
However, could the above scenario be
avoided?

In the Jeremy Geelan article it suggests requiring 100% certainty of
receiving a sent message -  a very
desirable goal.  Looking at historical services that may assist that goal
and re-act to bottleneck in order to
manage that event when it occurs,  I assume people are familiar with
voicemail and WAP/GPRS MMS delivery
mechanisms. Where the called party is not able to receive a message, the
network sends the message to a
message holding store. For MMS image messages, this will be a website. The
network can then send
a network announcement informing a subscriber (free of charge) to visit
their voicemail box or website in order to
collect a message, which the user can do straightaway or at a later date -
via their mobile or the computer
connecting to the Internet. The message is saved and not lost as a
consequence of bottleneck. Operators
can impose a time period for storage of a message. 30 days retention period
is common.

The above method does militate against  instantaneous messaging, but there
seems no major argument that
users are unhappy about that when collecting MMS messages. Therefore, it
could assist in the undesirable case
of bottleneck leading potentially to  loss of messages. Offloading traffic
and routing to another MSC
(inter-dependency) for delivery to a message centre might work. Moreover,
by deflecting a message to a message
centre (website) may help cure user ill feeling caused by being charged for
not getting a service.

The ROI may not be affected by this either. Isn't it the case that US users
are CPP (calling party pays) and RPP
(receiving party pays)? So what's the difference then for a user collecting
a message from a website, where the
message has been deflected due to bottleneck. At least that way a user can
still have the opportunity to get the
message and the operator would be explicitly meeting its stated
'obligation' to deliver messages and getting
paid at the same time.

Overall, the above doesn't remove the problem of bottleneck but attempts to
suggest one possible way to manage
the event of delivery of messages in cases of bottleneck, as against lost
messages altogether. It might be argued
that the above observations attempts to commercialise bottleneck and
support the notion for designing in limitations
to a system and/or leaving them in place to capitalise on optimisation
shortfalls. Well that could happen I suppose
 - but that is not for certain.

My comments above are not to say what should or should not be done, merely
to suggest could existing network
functions be utilised to manage the event of bottleneck to prevent lost of
messages. Objectively, I should add that the
fly in the ointment for my observations could happen where the operator
states "We tried that but no good" or
"We already do that, and we still have the problem of bottleneck."

I do not work for an operator and I have no vested interest in defending
any particular corner, except where I am
charged for an incomplete service. Then, I might just be persuaded to write
the 'mother of all letters'.
Greg UK

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 09:30:39 -0400

I  previously  posted a study that confirmed hundreds of thousands of SMS messages
were lost every year into SMS space. It also examined the delivery times of SMS
and found some messages were severely delayed.  The study did not specifically
identify  the cause of the lost/delayed messages but your "Bottle Neck"  theory
sounds possible.