Mobile operators quaking in their boots re: New Year's Eve traffic? I think not.

I’ve been reading a lot of news stories over the past few days that have been promoting an awe-struck message that, for example, one mobile operator is expecting to process 200 million text messages on New Year’s Eve.

I immediately thought, ‘oooh 200 million, that’s a lot………….’

Oooorrrrrrrrrrr is it?

I then knocked up some classic SMS Text News back-of-the-fag-packet calculations. Do remember that I’m no network level guru so if you are, feel free to correct the following.

200 million text messages.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that each text message requires ONLY 160 characters (I’m disgregarding overhead)

200 million messages x 160 characters = 32,000,000,000 characters.

For the sake of argument assume that this is 32,000,000,000 bytes, yes? Run with me on this one.

Now factor this figure down by 1024 to get Kilobytes.

32,000,000,000 divided by 1024 = 31,250,000k

Factor it down by another 1024 to get Megabytes….

31,250,000k divided by 1024 = 30,517.57 megabytes.

Or, roughly 30 gig.

Butter me in whisky and call me Kevin if that isn’t a piece of simplicity to process.

YES there’s database calls, yes there’s overhead, yes there’s localised congestion, yes there’s a ton of messages sent aorund midnight, but they’re not using your bog standard Dell laptop to process it, are they? (Well everyone but [insert name of your currently unfavoured operator here]. Most operators are kitted out with big servers, big big big servers with big support costs and huuuuuuuuuge processing power.

There might be the odd issue in terms of delivering text messages through a massively congested network, but they’ll get there. They should. They shouldn’t be lost or deleted by panicked admins. Those days should be well behind us.

So if your messages fail to deliver within 30 seconds on New Year’s Eve, let me know so I can publish a list of mobile operators who’re clearly not the full shilling in terms of their technology capabilities.

(Oh, and feel free to correct my brilliant mathematics.)