Quote:
Originally Posted by JCC37
Seems weird, how would they know that you are at a huge event like that? Is it based off of your location to cell towers?
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They would not know. This is based on the number of subscribers (phones) in a geographic area vs the throughput (bandwidth) of the number of available towers (transceivers). More users = more traffic. Fewer towers = less throughput. Since there are a limited number of towers and a limited amount of throughput in any given geographic location, as the number of users goes up the throughput per user goes down for that location. Some companies (like Verizon) have gotten around this by flooding virtually everywhere with towers to avoid issues such as this. It's all about investment in infrastructure. If AT&T would invest more, this would happen less.
The companies usually have the ability to throttle the throughput based on a predetermined set of parameters but this is usually an automatic function of the network. As demand increases so does throughput but at some point, the network simply becomes saturated due to lack of infrastructure. As this happens network traffic is prioritized, with voice likely being the highest priority and Data/SMS/MMS being the lowest, hence the SMS/MMS lag.