this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Moreso than you know. IIRC, cell phones had to constantly ping towers for service, and there was unused space in the packets for the pings, hence the 140 character limit. SMS simply piggybacked on the existing ping at no extra transmission cost to the carrier.
This is pretty close.
There was absolutely zero hit to their bandwidth for texts. Other than getting the software in place for it to work, there was almost no cost to them whatsoever.
Yep, an engineer in the late 80's said "hey, look at all this empty space in the management frames"... Frames that are continually sent when there's a connection, because it's a frame-based system. The space in the frames just happened to be... 144 characters worth.
Of course today SMS has to be simulated on 5G because it doesn't work like the CDMA based stuff (just like GSM had to do).
God I hate SMS. It's old, it's bad, it's unreliable (both in practice and technically).
SMS is still a lifesaver when you need to communicate with people who don't have a reliable data connection.
The problem is that SMS isn't reliable.
It has no error detection or correction. It's best-effort. There's not even validation between handset and tower. The phone encapsulates the message in the frames and sends them, assuming they arrive at the tower.
It's like shouting into a room and assuming the person got your message.
If connectivity is spotty, then SMS is spotty - and you have no idea if the other person didn't receive your message.
It's not really like that anymore on the newer networks.. Back 15 years ago, sure you'd miss texts or get them 4 days late, but I can't recall the last time a text went AWOL
Huh, even when you enable "SMS delivery reports"? If someone's phone is off and I SMS them, I get one checkmark, and once they're online again it gets two.
I mean, even if the constant ping was every minute. Back in the 2000s, some younings were sending texts multiple times a minute. So they did need more bandwidth.
Also, was receiving also part of the ping?
The ping was constantly. It's what registered the phone on the network and routed calls. If you called a phone it didn't know it was being called until the next ping cycle - so it was happening a few times a second.