Network Congestion: Dropping the Packet Ball
Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to a great 2008!
While I was home watching the ball drop in Times Square and celebrating the start of 2008 with friends and family, millions of other people were busy text messaging their far-flung friends and families to wish them a happy new year. According to the AP, however, a large percentage of those messages never made it to their destinations. The flood of text messages was blamed for a massive network “traffic jam” that caused some messages’ deliveries to be delayed several hours and others to never be delivered at all. Three thoughts:
- Since this same thing happened last year on New Year’s Eve, why didn’t the carriers plan for the SMS onslaught? I know that traffic spikes are not always predictable but come on, even trending would have caught this.
- What if the context had been a man-made or natural disaster instead of New Year’s revelry? Not “Hpy Nu Yr!” but “Celng colpsed. Trppd bneth rubbl.” Network congestion can quickly go from being a nuisance to being a matter of life or death.
- Finally, if the networks can’t handle a flood of 1kb SMS messages, how on earth are they going to handle even moderate levels of consumer adoption of video services that are literally thousands of times the size?
In a market where service quality is a significant competitive differentiator, I never cease to be amazed by events like this. How long will carriers cede control of their service delivery/quality by taking a passive approach to planning their networks? One of the most important “new year’s resolutions” that should be on every carrier’s list as we begin 2008 is “take back control of service delivery by taking control of network evolution.” Otherwise, it’s a pretty safe bet the AP will be able to recycle this story again next year.
