>Something rings a bell in my head that (recently) it was reported that the >phone companies didn't want people sending more SMS messages because the >network was at capacity. Ironically, the first PAYG phone I had charged 5p >per message (and still does). Since then it went up.
yeah, the infrastructure of the networks is at very high capacity, but its because the switches they are using were designed to handle voice calls, and sms's were an afterthought. there is just a need to upgrade the switches to newer versions which have better support for SMS. lots of the gateways get maxed out under an "average load" and its causing all sorts of problems. >But do they have the real backend network infrastructure to deal with it? >I don't know. doubt it. most mobile companies seem to have spent too much on marketing and not enough on backend infrastructure. the good side is that theres rather a lot of juicy equipment available at auctions of telco companies that have gone out of business recently. >I pay for (at least) 1Mb of GPRS per month (which I use quite heavily) and >in general it's fuck all use for anything except mudding, where I can work >for an hour and only use 40Kb. The packet loss at link level is about 50%, >it drops connection every 10 minutes (Hey, I thought this was meant to be >"always on", I daresay if I tie up one of Vodafone's modems for 24 hours >they won't make me a popular person.) With a web browser, I'll haul down a >meg in no time. Small pages have lost popularity now that so many people >have broadband. as far as im concerned imode/gprs/3g is only good for email. yeah its bad for london.pm and (void) type email, but great for "advanced text messages" (ie not having to bash at my mobile phone for ages to only get 160 characters of information). duncan
