I had always assumed that texting was always and forever instantaneous, but I guess I assumed wrong, as a friend reported that texts I had sent her up to 24 hours earlier arrived much later than when I had sent them-in some cases pics were involved, which might have increased the delay (download speed limit?). Just curious if this common among you guys.
Were either of you roaming or in an area where you lost your data/internet/3G connection?
Yeah, definitely common for me. It was bad enough in the “real” SMS days due to unfathomable carrier delays. Now it’s even worse since Google Voice adds another layer of delay on top of it all, and its internet-delivered fake text messages are really unreliable (not sure if that’s an issue in your case).
It has to do with how txting works. Standard ‘short message text only’ txting and cell phone calls use the same protocol to get a message to the phone right away, within the time you would expect a phone call to go through. These are pretty much instantaneous except when the cell tower can’t communicate with your phone (out of range or too busy in the reserved ‘txting slot’ to send your txt), at which case it tries again later, and that can be awhile.
So it is not unheard of to get a txt a day or so later.
Multimedia txting I believe may use the standard protocol above to let the phone know there is a multimedia txt, but the phone needs to log on and download it, this will take longer. I think longer texts also do this.
Apple has introduced a iphone to iphone txting protocol that tries to use the internet first to transmit the text, by default it tries for several minutes but if it can’t find the other iphone online will send it via the cellular system. Apparently from the above post Google has something simular.
LTE (4G) may handle this differently.
With plain-text messages, I have seen delivery in anything from a few seconds to over eight hours, when we both have our phones turned on, not roaming, and in a good coverage area. I was talking to my daughter one evening and she asked why I didn’t respond to her text earlier in the day. I showed her the response on my phone. About an hour later, the response appeared on hers.