>While I was testing it, the whole pipeline, from pressing the "go" button to the page being fully rendered could take as little as 15 seconds.
How is that possible? I thought the whole point of SMS was that it resided in the wasted bytes towers use when they "ping" phones. The reason text messages aren't instant is that these pings aren't sent frequently. I could be way out to lunch on my understanding, but this seems to be a latency killer (not to mention the limitations of packet size).
FaceKicker
The responses aren't sent by SMS, but MMS. My understanding is that to download an MMS you essentially get a data connection with your provider that only lets you download MMSes.
How is that possible? I thought the whole point of SMS was that it resided in the wasted bytes towers use when they "ping" phones. The reason text messages aren't instant is that these pings aren't sent frequently. I could be way out to lunch on my understanding, but this seems to be a latency killer (not to mention the limitations of packet size).