The Hogmanay Strain of Mobile Messaging
by Ewan Spence
And so it begins.
My phone is already beeping at me with text’s from all my friends wishing me a Happy New Year – of course being Scottish Hogmanay (December the 31st) is effectively the start of a three day national holiday which is know for drinking vile drinks, eating vile animals, and generally enjoying life as much as possible.
But it also coincides with one of the busiest times for the UK mobile networks in terms of traffic not of voice calls, but in texts. The New Year message, as midnight strikes, invariably sees a significant number of subscribers on every network send an SMS wishing them all the best for 2008. And it’s not just to one person, it’s to a significant proportion, if not all, of their address book.
Now take the average address book, multiply that out by the number of people looking to send such a batch of messages, and there’s no doubt that come Jan 2nd, I’m sure the PR departments will warm-up the “written on Dec 14th minus the number†press release with “the biggest year for texts yet in the United Kingdom.†And I’m also sure we’ll hear the stories of texts taking hours to get through, network saturation at the centre of street parties, a log-jam of data and calls in networks that struggle to cope.
Make no bones, this is one of the biggest nights of the year for mobile messaging, certainly in the UK. Yes there has been localised pressure over the last months and years (case in point being the London Underground bombings) but this is both predictable, and nationwide (and I’m sure a wodge of international traffic in and out as well).
So do you design your network for the peak of the busiest night, or do you aim somewhere below that because the spare capacity isn’t needed for the other 354 days? My guess is probably the later, but knowing that the networks are constantly expanding, I suspect the capacity that is filled tonight would have easily coped with the traffic from last year, and capacity 12 months down the line would cope with tonight. This increase in bandwidth, capacity and handling goes on behind the scenes without the subscriber even realising, and for all that we complain about the big bad networks, take a moment to think just how many texts will get shuffled around tonight, even if there is a ten-fifteen minute delay on some of them.
Happy New Year!!!
Update: While coverage was spotty in Edinburgh, there were no real delays on voice - only took three rings to get through mobile to mobile at about ten past midnight. Txts seemed to flow freely, as they also did for Ewan McLeod. How did your messages get through?
