When the clock struck midnight just a few days ago, many of us hopped on our cell phones to wish our friends and family well in 2009. Of course, many of us were also faced with bouncebacks and terribly long sending delays. Why might this be?
CTIA, the Cellular Telephone Industry Association, as of June, 2008 reports that there are
262,720,165 mobile phone users in the US
Of all these users, there are
240,000,000 phones that can send text messages.
We’re going to take our first leap of faith here and assume that each phone belongs to a different individual. This probably is not the case all the time, but multiple-phone ownership isn’t terribly common yet.
So we’ve got 240 million people who CAN send text messages and as of June, 2008, over 75 billion (that’s right, with a ‘b’) text messages are sent in the US every month
Leap of faith #2: Number of text messages sent per day:
(75,000,000,000 messages/month) / (30 days/month) = 2,500,000,000 messages sent per day = 28,935 messages per second.
Leap of faith #3: Number of people sending messages per day:
(2500000000 messages/day) / (240,000,000 potential users) = 10.416 messages per user per month. Let’s round down for the sake of trying to make up for our estimations.
Maximum amount of data in one text message = 160 bytes
Amount of data sent between 12:00:00 and 12:01:00 = 60 seconds
160 bytes/message * 28,395 messages/second * 60 seconds = 1703700 bytes = 259.96 = 260 megabytes
Now let’s assume that not everyone sent a text message exactly between midnight and 12:01, and I’m sure some people sent the messages just a minute or so before midnight as well.
160 bytes/message * 28,395 messages/second * 60 seconds * 8 minutes = 2 079.71 mb = 2.07 gigabytes of data sent in 8 minutes in the whole US
The last part is important here. Our wireless infrastructure isn’t that amazing yet. We still have to connect by Wifi to get large iPhone apps. Imagine what happens if instead of the whole country sending 2 gigs of data, we have just one quarter of the country sending just as much or more data? You know what happens, because you probably experienced the phenomenon of waiting 20+ minutes to send “Happy 2009!” to your friends.
We didn’t even take into account sending multiple messages, as I and I’m sure many of you did, so the amount of traffic can probably be multiplied by at least 3-5 times to get a semi-kind-of-more-reasnoable estimate.
You probably knew most of this. Sorry for wasting your time.
This post is tagged Behavior, data, mobile phones, new years, technology, text messages