How Message Volume Impacts Cellular Hardware

Text Message Volume and Cellular Hardware

Cellular hardware is, by far, the fastest and most reliable method of sending SMS with PageGate. However, the hardware itself has its own limitations on how fast it can push the traffic to the outside world.

Typically speaking, cellular hardware will be able to accept one message for delivery every 2 or 3 seconds, which means that the upper delivery rate on most cellular hardware is between 20 and 30 messages per minute. If you try to push more traffic than the device is capable of handling, you'll receive a CMS Error 500 indicating that the device has been overloaded and that can cause message delivery headaches like missed messages.

To account for the fact that cellular hardware has a delivery rate limit and that each device's limit might be slightly different, we've created a new Carrier Template value that allows you to control how fast PageGate will communicate with the device(s). When using the GSM-AT or GSM-AT-IP protocols with PageGate, you'll want to go in to the Template of the carrier, then specify this value in the 'Settings' section:
InterMessageDelay =

This template implements a slight pause between message deliveries and the value is expressed in milliseconds. So, if we used an InterMessageDelay value of 2000, it would delay for 2 seconds between messages and this is the value we recommend starting with. It may be possible for your cellular hardware to deliver messages more quickly, so you may want to try lowering that to 1500 or 1000 to see if your device can support that rate of delivery. Though, again, if you overload your cellular hardware, you'll likely receive a "CMS Error 500" from the device(s).

It's important to note that each device you're using will need its own connector and that PageGate can support up to 16 simultaneous connectors, all using their own cellular device. For example, since we know that the upper rate of delivery for a single cellular modem is 30 messages per minute, let's say that you have an environment where you need to send out a minimum of 120 messages per minute. That would mean you would need four cellular devices and four connectors in PageGate; one connector for each device.