AT&T controlling your SMS

Okay so I've observed this over many events.

I've gone to concerts, races, anything with a big event of people and I've noticed. We are paying for SMS. But at these big events with tons of people...AT&T delays or shuts off SMS for the entire event. Are they allowed to do that? Even tho people are paying for unlimited texting or pay per text just to have AT&T to shut off the SMS for the elapse of the event?

Example: I was at one of the nascar races (I hate nascar I just went cause it was a family day) and I was sending text after text after text to all my friends telling them hey look for me on TV. And I never receive a single text back. But what was happening was AT&T was letting me send them but not receive until the event was over. So after the race and we got out I got about 40 texts from people sending me text messages that I never got. They were getting mine but I wasn't getting theirs. I have 5 bars full service.

I want to simply know has anyone else noticed this or has it happened to any of you?

Well if the network is congested, there isn't much they can do, except install more equipment.

Network congestion is a likely cause for this as aptmunich alluded to earlier. If you remember, the Super Bowl organizers allowed extra equipment to be installed to handle the high levels of congestion expected if extra equipment hadn't be installed. If this wasn't accounted for at a Nascar event, this could be a problem.

vansmith said:

Network congestion is a likely cause for this as aptmunich alluded to earlier. If you remember, the Super Bowl organizers allowed extra equipment to be installed to handle the high levels of congestion expected if extra equipment hadn't be installed. If this wasn't accounted for at a Nascar event, this could be a problem.

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When why doesn't AT&T get with the program and upgrade a lot of there towers. I know it costs money but they make tons and tons of money for features they don't even provide during events.

You answered your own question. It's all about money. Unless enough people complain, AT&T has no incentive to spend the money to upgrade hardware.

It's also kind of like bandwidth. When a website gets flooded with visitors, it just can't keep up. So why don't they have enough bandwidth to support this number of visitors? It's too expensive. They have a little more than enough to support the expected daily amount. Anything more is just wasted money for infrequent fluctuation.

wireless carriers do not have the ability to just turn off txt messaging for a specific location, with out interfering with your calls. They would have to block down the entire tower and those around it to prevent you from receiving txt, then again, it would prevent you from sending text or making calls.

the only other way would to be shot off the sms server, and that shuts off EVERYONE from sending and receiving.

I've observed this happening at any number of social events, and my oldest and I have observed it when she was living on Campus. The network would get overloaded and texting would lag. This seems to be worst between AT&T and T-Mobile, at least here in SoCal. I suspect it's because neither has the best coverage on a tower by tower level and both get bogged down easily. When we were all on Verizon we NEVER observed this issue. Yet another reason that AT&T sucks.

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?

JCC37 said:

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.

Maybe it was a Sprint Cup Series event and AT&T was staging a boycott...