Cellular industry is clueless

I recently got a new cellphone, and it has text messaging. I've found this feature to be remarkably handy, but found that one person couldn't send me messages. I can call and send text messages to a friend in Canada, but only phone calls come back: text messages to my phone just get lost. We've run some tests between our phones and that of other subscribers and are sure that it's not any of our individual accounts: it seems that Rogers/AT&T Wireless (in Canada) subscribers cannot send text messages to Verizon subscribers in the US.

My friend's analysis:

My theory was that the text messages are received using separate gateways. We operate on gateway #1, your carrier on gateway #2. After further investigation, my theory proves correct. Essentially what this means is you can send text to us but we can't send text to you. This is the result of a roaming parameter which exists on the backend configuration for inter-carrier communication. It's not something that's related to hardware or network socs. Given that, there's nothing we can do at this time.

I suppose I could imagine some situation where any two carriers had to make some kind of arrangement to exchange messages -- kinda like internet peering -- but the fact that messages just get lost is astonishing to me. We're not talking about an occasional dropped message - perhaps this is inevitable - but a consistent, reproduceable black hole. And in only one direction!

Rogers/AT&T is the largest cellular carrier in Canada, and Verizon is very large in the US. This is an enormous perception-of-reliability issue, and I'm just flabbergasted that such a thing could exist.

Posted by Steve at September 20, 2002 09:49 AM | TrackBack