Robh5791 wrote:
I switched to AT&T about 13 months ago from Verizon. On thanksgiving night last year I noticed that I sent a text around dinner time to a group of people and that message was not received by any of them until hours later. I contacted support the next day and they replaced my SIM card. This did not fix the problem. Random text messages continued to be delivered to people hours later then sent. I eventually had apple replace my phone to eliminate that is the reason in December of last year. The problem continued. It is now going on a year of this happening off and on and still have messages delivered to others at least 90 mins after I send them.
To better explain, I sent a message at 8:02 one day, another at 8:05 and a third at 8:07 and the first and third were delivered when I sent them but the middle one was delivered about 90 mins later.
I am literally losing my mind and annoying for is da and family because it appears that I am not answering people when I do or for example I was in a store the other night and asked my brother if his daughter had something since her birthday was the next day, well he responded to my text 90 mins later but responded as soon as he received the message on his end. I spoke to AT&T tech support last night for another hour and nothing came of it, I was supposed to receive a call from someone about this issue today but again no call back. I was finally told today by someone at AT&T that possibly it's an app on my phone interfering with the messages. That is ludicrous since apple does not permit third party apps to access messages other than to send something through the messages app.
I am at my wits end and am almost willing to jump back to Verizon which means it will cost me 200 to get out of a contract with a company that offers texting service but does not deliver said messages in a timely manner. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know because AT&T has failed to assist with this for nearly a year now. Thanks in advance.
Well, you have several possibilities here. You mention Apple, so that implies you have an iPhone. Are you using Apple's iMessage feature to send your text messages? Are the people you are sending the messages to also using iPhones and iMessage?
If you are using iMessage, all of your text messages are sent from your iPhone to an APple server which will then send the message directly to the other iPhone using the data connections, and if the other end is not an iPhone, or is an iPhone but iMessage is not available, then Apple will route your text messages out through their cellular connecitons as sent from your phone number. Any of the steps along the way on the Apple eco-system can cause delays in the process, especially if the Apple system is sending the messages as SMS. In the past, there were issues with the Apple messaging system which would cause my iPhone to not receive messages that were sent to me until I would restart my iPhone. In some cases, it was actually longer than a day.
Next is the part that most peole have a hard time accepting. SMS messages have never been guaranteed to be delivered to the recipient. SMS messages are sent using "spare control channel bandwidth" on the cellular network. That means that the messages may be delayed, or may never get sent if the network is highly congested. It is also not uncommon for messages between carriers to experience additional delays, and in these cases, they may even be only one-sided, where messages you send to a person on another carrier go through just fine, but their response never makes it back to you, or is greatly delayed. This still goes back to the basic design which uses "spare bandwidth" that might not aways be available, which can cause delays.