What is Wrong With Text Messaging?

I remember the first time I used text messaging. I had just returned from a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during the few years that texting had gotten popular. I thought it was the most amazing thing I had seen, a mobile phone sending a small email! Well that capability has been greatly surpassed by what phones can do today. Amazing as that technology was, it is time for it to either be fixed or done away with.

What do I mean? Texting is amazingly unreliable, especially when texting between two different cell phone carriers. My wife and I are on seperate carriers (I won't say who, it doesn't matter). She sent me a text message at just after 7 pm asking me to pick up bread and hot dog buns after work. I got several messages at 7:59 asking if I had gotten her messages. I told her no. Then, at 8:47, after getting the bread and hot dog buns I get a text message from my wife asking me to get bread and hot dog buns.

Nearly an hour and a half? Really? How is that possible? I know a lot about networks and that packets can be lost or stuck in a network for a while. But for a network a "while" (admittedly a relative term) means a few seconds. Most packets on a network only live for 256 jumps from one router to the next. That can only take a few seconds. I just pinged a Chinese server. It took 48 jumps, traveled across the Pacific and half way around the world and took 195 milliseconds. That is .195 seconds. And hour and a half is unacceptable. This isn't the first time I have had this problem, and it won't be the last.

I have been using instant messageing on my phone for a few months now and haven't run into these problems. Using IM+ on Android and imo on both Android and iOS with Facebook and GTalk as the back ends messages are nearly instanteous, much less than a second. So it can be done. The problem is that these services only work over an IP network connection. If you don't have a data plan on your phone it is impossible to do.

Open protcols are there. XMPP (often called Jabber) is an Internet standard that does exactly this. Lets get rid of the current text message back and create somethings that can actually DO THE JOB! And then let's integrate it into the current cell phone text message system.