Manage your Mobile - Flea OLE!

but NOT with the "off" button!

Ever called someone on their mobile and received a harassed response like “can’t talk now - I’m in a meeting”? Did you feel guilty for disturbing them?

Well - you shouldn’t! You’re not in control of their diary or their phone! If they can’t manage a mobile properly, it’s certainly not your fault.

It’s easy to set a mobi to ‘silent ring’ or ‘transfer all voice calls to voicemail’ - and that’s exactly what should be done in such situations. The message received tone should be ‘off’ too - ideally by setting a profile that silences all tones.

But DON’T switch off your mobi in meetings - that can cause your messages to be delayed...

‘Why’s that?’ you may reasonably ask! After all, I’m often asked to switch off at meetings.

Well - here’s why...

When your mobile’s switched off, it cannot be contacted by the MSC - the Mobile Switching Centre at the heart of every mobile phone system.

If the system receives a message for you - either SMS or a media message, it will try to contact your phone to deliver the message. It will remember the base station (the mobile phone tower) that your phone was last registered at (which it finds from a database called a Location Register) and will try to send you the message through that base station. It will of course fail because your phone’s switched off, so it will put your message into a “holding” queue.

Although some systems will search for any queued messages as soon as a mobile re-registers on the system (by being switched on and in range of a base station) others will try to resend messages, initially fairly frequently but to avoid inefficient use of the network, the intervals become progressively longer dependent on the number of failed attempts.

If your mobile service provider’s system uses this incremental delay arrangement then, depending on how long your mobile remains inaccessible, you could find there is a considerable period (even several hours) between the time you switch back on and the time you receive any missed messages. Furthermore, if the message server failed or was reset during the period before you received your missed messages, it’s quite likely that they will be irretrievably lost - and of course messaging is a one-way affair, no message is returned to the sender to advise about the loss!

But most importantly, although messaging should not be considered a totally secure nor necessarily instant method of communication, it is generally so reliable and fast that people tend to use it even for urgent messages. By leaving your phone switch ‘on’ but silent, you can still see your messages without disturbing others in a meeting - and one day, just one message may be both important and urgent - so why delay seeing it by having your phone switched off?

This article was created on Sunday, 27th December 2009. It was last tinkered with on Sunday, 3rd January 2010.

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