Sending Data In Bursts of SMS Messages 181
Posted
by
timothy
from the out-of-band-and-back-again dept.
from the out-of-band-and-back-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Canadian carrier Rogers has been experiencing some extreme loads of late, as researchers at the University of Waterloo investigate the potential for sending data spread across bursts of hundreds of text messages. They sent around 80,000 messages in the course of a project testing a new protocol able to cram 32KB into 250 messages sent from a BlackBerry, reaching a rate of 20 bytes per second. The group thinks its protocol could be useful in rural areas of the developing world where text messaging is the only affordable, reliable link."
Re:My Sprint service isn't reliable (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to bring that up. I frequently see out of order messages on quite a few providers, in various locations (major cities around the US and Canada). I had a server monitoring the rest of my servers. It would send timestamped messages when there was a problem status. In the event of a big problem, it would send a whole flurry of them. When your pager goes nuts, you know it's something major that needs your undivided attention immediately. Most would arrive on time. Sometimes messages would show up out of order, or hours late. It's scary when you think the whole issue has been resolved, and then you get another "down" page an hour or so later. That's why we timestamped them, so we'd know if it was just late showing up.
Re:Why??..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is more a case of "Look mama, IP over SMS! With No hands!" than a solution for any real world problem.
Re:Neato! (Score:3, Interesting)
At 601.90 MB per gregorian year, that's not so far off...
Re:My 300 baud modem shivered... (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember using acoustical modems back in 1974 and they weren't that new back then
I've actually considered seeing if I could get a v.32 in-software stack to communicate over the bluetooth headset/microphone protocol so I could do very basic data networking over a cell phone without a data plan. Like ssh.
I came to my senses, but I kinda still want to try it anyway.
Re:My 300 baud modem shivered... (Score:5, Interesting)
Very old hat trick - This existed before (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember WAP?
The WAP service had three posible bearers, GPRS (the best for it), a circuit switched dedicated 9600bps link (later upgraded to 14.4kbps, or even 56kbps), or SMS.
Well yes, in WAP times there was a full spec on how to transport data on lowly SMS. As other posters have said, using SMS as a bearer for other data services is painfull, slow, ackward, and not such a good idea.
Ah, this brings memories!
http://www.m-indya.com/wap/wap_bearers.htm
Re:My 300 baud modem shivered... (Score:3, Interesting)
At 110/300 Baud, you did a lot of mental pre-processing of your requests.
Listing out hundreds of lines (unless you were getting a listing) was
not the way to go.
Vi runs OK at 1200 baud on a 24X80 display, If you know that you're
looking for.