this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Excessive traffic, like sporting events, concerts, fairs, natural disasters etc. Are a lot of fun to engineer. A lot of times they will use a cell on wheels or COW. At first mobile operators didn't order a lot of these, but slowly increased their stock.
For natural disasters they really should have made the text message system more resilient. Then if they had to cut data or voice service for non-emergency personnel, at least people could still communicate by text. Instead, they gave us video over text messages. Bah, humbug.
Short message is a feature of mobile service and not part of current data services. It's related to your voice service. So, if you lock up the radio with voice services, you lock up text. Plus, short message is a best effort service and does not have priority over voice.
I thought traditional SMS was purely a 2g or maybe 3g thing, and it is absent from 5g, though maybe simulated somehow. Amirite? I know MMS has been around for a while and it seems harder to escape from now. Even voice service is now done through the internet pipe, though maybe it has special routing at the carrier level.
SMS may have been marginal/best effort in the past but it would have been better to make it more robust and make work in places with not enough signal to handle voice/data, not convert it to video.
Voice and data services are separate in the radio network. 4G and beyond does not change that. It's part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard.
Actually, text messages are more robust in some ways. But, your packets are going to a centralized server which forwards them on.