Problem with smart phone

[Peter B]

My wife's smart phone is a few years old. Like mine it's about as bottom of the range as you can get (Nokia/Microsoft) - all we need our phones for is old fashioned phone calls and SMSs. Neither of us needs to connect to the internet while we're out and we haven't knowingly loaded or activated any apps.

Anyway, this morning she tried to send a text message to one of the other Mums at school. But no matter what, the message just wouldn't go - there'd be a big delay on the phone and after a minute or so it would back out and give no indication of having sent the message. She then sent a couple of three word messages to my phone; they got sent, but took a few minutes to arrive. She sent a message of a couple of sentences and that took half an hour to reach my phone while I was driving to work. A yet longer message she sent to me still hasn't arrived several hours later.

We're with Vodafone, which doesn't have the best reputation in Australia, and we happen to live in a bit of a signal shadow - people have trouble making their handheld wireless EFTPOS machines work in our driveway, but they work fine a couple of houses up the street.

I was able to send the messages my wife couldn't, which suggested to both of us that the problem is with her phone rather than the network.

But what exactly is the problem with the phone? I sort of thought that with devices like this a function like SMS either works or it doesn't; I didn't think that short messages could get through when long messages wouldn't...

Does anyone have any ideas of what the problem is or what we can do (or who we can talk to) to fix it?

Or do we need to head off to the mobile phone shop and buy another phone?

Thanks for any assistance!

[Obviousman]

I know it is no help, but the issue is you are with Vodaphone.

Go to Boost. $40 per month, unlimited calls / text, 3GB of data, 2GB of additional data each weekend, uses Telstra network.

We have rarely been disappointed with it, and many friends have moved to it.

[Zakalwe]

There's no guarantee on the delivery times on texts. Yes, they normally happen pretty quickly, but there's no SLA on delivery.

I sometimes have texts that take a couple of times to send...I put it down to congestion on the particular cell that I am on (on EE in the UK).

[frenat]

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

[smartcooky]

There are a few possible reasons for this problem.

1. At the time the texts were sent, your sending phone was not connected to the network (out of range of the nearest tower or you were, as you say, in signal shadow area). What will happen here is that your phone will keep retrying whenever it gets a connection to the network, but if the signal level is low or intermittent, the text might not go straight away.  Your phone generally will not notify you if this is happening, and the delays caused by this should not be long.

If you were somewhere near a radio or a stereo at the time, you might hear this sound coming from the speakers

This is RF interference caused by the pulse transmitter in your phone sending interrogation pulses as it tries to find a network to connect to.

2. The second problem could be with the receiving phone. If it is out of the range of a tower or in a signal shadow area, the network cannot deliver the text. The text will be held until such time as the network detects that the receiving phone is connected again. Delays for this can be considerably longer in periods of high traffic and your message may not be immediately ready for delivery at the time you connect.

3. Network overload. At time of high network traffic, there could be considerable delays while your message is waiting in the queue for sending or delivery.

I don't believe the length if the text (number of words) will have any noticeable impact on delivery times, although a PXT will likely take longer to send (upload) and receive (download).   

SIDE NOTE: It is these pulse transmissions that aviation authorities worry about with regard to having your cellphone switched on in flight. If your phone is on, it will be continually trying to connect to a network and transmitting these pulses. IIRC from my radar days, pulses have a very wide bandwidth, and can create harmonic signal  interference well outside the frequency band in which they are transmitted. Many of the nav-aids on modern airliners such as VOR, ILS and IFF (squawk box) use pulse transmissions over similar and/or adjacent RF bands to those used by cellphones. While your phone alone might not cause a problem, you multiply that by a coupe of hundred phones on the plane all transmitting pulses, and the potential for interference increases significantly