A lot of iMessages sending as texts?

[Ben]

Is anyone else seeing a lot of their blue iMessages reverting to regular text messaging?

This happens when the recipient cannot receive the iMessage within a certain time, so Apple/iCloud is assuming that no data connection is available and retrying by SMS instead.

My immediate thought is that iMessage is a new service and over time this will improve... but what if it's something more sinister? What if it's actually saying quite a lot about the UK mobile networks?

When people are on WiFi it generally seems to work fine. But when they're off on cellular it gets a bit... hit and miss. Any thoughts?

This isn't really a moan about iMessage; I think it's fantastic! But something's not quite perfect.

[Wilt]

Seems like the behaviour of 3G data in general - as soon as there is a bit of traffic on there (I think I read you've been having congestion problems recently) then you might as well give up because about half of the time the data transfer will go wrong.

[Hands0n]

Yup, I'm with Wilt on this one. You're on Vodafone and what with their latencies, jitter and overall mobile data congestion, the chances of iMessage working reduce. I'm not an avid texter so I don't really notice this at all.

[DBMandrake]

The problem is more likely at the receiving end ?

What if the person you're trying to iMessage to is on GPRS at the time ? GPRS is generally too slow for even application push notifications to work reliably in my experience, and sometimes data on GPRS is impossible altogether depending on local cell loading. If push notifications can't get through, iMessages won't.

One scenario I can think of is someone who is at home on Wifi but only gets GPRS coverage - when their phone is awake it will be receiving notifications via Wifi so they will be received quickly and efficiently, however if they put their phone down for 5 minutes and it goes to sleep, Wifi turns off, and it reverts to the much slower more unreliable GPRS, then your iMessage doesn't go through to them.

I think most likely iMessage is indeed exposing the unreliability of mobile data - with push email and push application notifications you really don't notice if they've been delayed a few minutes or not unless you're talking to someone who says "I've just sent you an email", even then you don't know if the delay is between ISP's or is due to your data connection. So delays happen here and there due to lost or very slow data connections, but we don't really realise.

iMessage is one of the first push services that you will be using fully interactively, which will expose any delays or failure to go through.

One thing is for sure, GPRS and EDGE really aren't up to the job for reliable push notifications, 3G is the minimum requirement, and even then very slow or flakey 3G will give problems.

A conspiracy theorist might also suggest that its not in networks best interests to optimize data for iMessage - any iMessages that "accidentally" don't go through will be resent as SMS messages. Opps! ;)

[Hands0n]

All of which, of course, exposes the complete fallacy that 2G/EDGE is suitable fall-back to 3G unavailability. I have never, ever, believe that. My own experience of the old 2G technology predates even the notion of 3G, and even then I realised the weakness inherent, that it would not scale either. Fast forward to 2011 and nothing has made me change my mind on that fact.

Fact: 2G network technology is wholly unsuited for use by smartphones.

[DaveC]

" Fact: 2G network technology is wholly unsuited for use by smartphones"

I would not say 'wholly' unsuited. I was away in Wales recently and I could still get my email, update Facebook and Twitter and use GTalk. Nothing actually refused to work even if the speed was not great which had the advantage that I had more time to taste my beer!

[Hands0n]

:) I claim editorial licence :)

Seriously though the general experience, particularly in urban areas, seems to be that where 3G is not available that the 2G that is saturates very quickly and becomes unusable. It rather depends on prevailing conditions. I've experienced this for myself with [most notably] O2 and also Vodafone in London. One will see 5 bars of 2G signal, calls and texts work fine, however data fails abysmally, even with EDGE being available. Reason? All of the other local smartphones are contending for a resource that was never designed or intended for such [relatively] heavy use.

When I was on O2 with my iPhone, in central and East London there would be many a time I would sit, watch and wait endlessly for a simple web page to load, where often it simply would not. So I'd put the smartphone away until I got back to the office and WiFi. The experience [on O2's network, the best for widely available 2G and EDGE] repeated across Android, WP7 (Omnia 7) and WebOS (Pre 2+).

Beer is good :)

[DBMandrake]

It's kind of depressing that in 2011, when LTE is starting to roll out in some countries, and some 8 years after 3G started rolling out around the world, that the usefulness of 2G fallback is still even debated.

2G is a dead technology, and the sooner its buried the better. It can't do data and voice at the same time, (except for a grafted on, almost never supported extension called Dual Transfer Mode, which in the UK only Vodafone and a few new Nokia handsets support) maximum speeds and number of simultaneous users is pitifully low, and the encryption is well and truly broken, allowing for "man in the middle" attacks, eavesdropping, and spoofing using portable equipment such as that recently bought by the UK police.

2G is such a broken technology by todays standards that its as if we were all still using 1999 era WEP encryption on our Wifi, despite being fully aware that its completely broken. Cracking of WEP lead to widespread adoption of WPA and WPA2, yet cracking of GSM lead to.......nothing. GSM is still as vulnerable as the day it was cracked many years ago, and despite the fact that UMTS (without 2G fallback) fixes many (most?) of the security vulnerabilities in GSM, somehow fallback to GSM is still seen as a good thing.

People and networks need to wake up and smell the coffee, and stop running their businesses and lives on ancient, insecure, slow, and woefully inadequate technology when there is not one but two later generations of technology now available. (Is anyone still using or is satisfied with 56k dialup internet access at home ? Yet what we have on 2G is similar or worse than that)

We don't even have ubiquitous 3G coverage on low frequencies in the UK yet, and LTE is nearly upon us. 3G today is entry level, not high end, and it baffles me beyond belief that in this day and age networks cling to 2G so tenuously.

There really needs to be an aggressive push to both massively roll out low frequency 3G, start deploying LTE, and do the mobile phone equivalent of the analog tv switch-off - warn everyone that in x number of years 2G will be switched off for good and that they have that amount of time to upgrade to a 3G capable phone or lose service.

Perhaps it would take a mandate from Ofcom to do this across all the networks, and I doubt they have the spine to do it, but we can hope. Continuing to provide 2G services in the long term is a gross waste of bandwidth allocation - 3G allows a far greater aggregate data throughput and call throughput per cell for a given bandwidth allocation - so by keeping a large chunk of spectrum in 2G use maximum potential is lost, and there is less capacity available for end users.

Progressively re-farming existing 2G spectrum to 3G maximizes the use of the frequency allocations, and should be part of a progressive move towards a complete 2G switch-off.