I've been told by more than one customer that they didn't get plays until after the game had kicked off. It wasn't that I didn't believe them- I didn't WANT to believe them- because with a few exceptions where I got information late, I did my best to send out plays at a minimum of 45 minutes before game-time, thinking that should be more than enough cushion. Little did I know that it can literally take HOURS for a text to be delivered.

How many text messages do you think are sent each day worldwide? 27 BILLION--- EVERY DAY! That's 275,000 per second! And that doesn't count WhatsApp (who does a mind boggling 100 BILLION messages per day JUST IN THE U.S., or Twitter, SnapChat, or any of about 40 more options. If you happen to jump in when there's a bit of a slowdown, or you happen to be texting within the same zip code, or you're within a few miles of the person you're texting to and you both use the same carrier, your text might seem almost instantaneous! Unfortunately, it's a little more complicated!

Let's look at towers- that's what you seen on TV ads. American Tower owns about 43,000 towers, Crown Castle owns 41,000, SBA owns 17,000 and U.S. Cellular owns about 6,000. American Tower and Crown Castle are owned by Investment Bankers and they are aligned with AT&T and Verizon respectivley. SBA is traded and U.S. Cellular owns its own. Ownership and access is carefully guarded so as not to wake up a dozing Big Brother, but as you HAVE to be able to understand, with 50 or so companies using the same 115,000 towers somebody is going to get bumped, sent to the back of the line, garbled, or worse- dropped.

There are a couple of things working in our favor: An absolutely amazing 99.5+ percent of all texts are delivered in 9 minutes or less and after you meet a few technical standards (which we now do) and you move up a couple of levels on the plan you're signed up for (which we did) you can get a priority tag on the texts you send and you can get that 99.5% up to 99.7% and the 9 minutes down to 5 minutes. We have done all the things we can do as far as text reliability goes- and it has not been cheap. We are not asking our customers to shoulder any of the 45K plus price on any of this by going up on Season Service. But we are asking our customers to recognize one thing- and reward us for it- We do not stop trying to make our service the best in the country- and we never will. It doesn't do me a damn bit of good to work tons of hours and come up with a winning play- and then you don't get it because some idiot wanted to send a whole album of sexy-selfies to her nim-wit boyfriend who is TDY in Iceland.

THERE IS ONE OTHER THING YOU CAN DO THAT WILL REALLY HELP:

One potential problem for our text messages is caused by the fact that we send our texts to your phones from a computer. When we do that, the carrier (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) makes us add a code to the address we're sending the text to. We'll use my number as an example. 1-901-461-4600. If you send a text to me from your phone, that's all you need. By the way, while we're doing Texting 101, I'll throw something else in: You've noticed that sometimes the text you send has a blue background and when the person answers, their answer text has a blue background around it. Other times, your text- or one of the answer texts might be in a different color background. This doesn't mean there is a problem- it just means that not everybody was on the same carrier. I digress!

If you want to send a text to my phone from a computer (or a website) each carrier makes you add a code to the address (which text to text would be just the phone number) and the added code turns the text into an email and it also serves to notify other carriers out there that this email belongs to a particular company. For my phone, 901-461-4600, becomes 9014614600@mms.att.net. Remember, you're sending this as a text message and that's the way it will appear, and be announced, on your phone. So, along the way, from the computer that sent it, to the phone that will receive it, this address has to change from an email to a text and back at least a couple of times. Opportunities for problems!

My point is that you can add a simple email program to your phone (I'm betting you may already have email on your phone) give us the email address, we'll add it to our list of addresses our system sends to when we contact our customers and you will add a layer of dependability when it comes to receiving your plays and you'll enjoy a significant change in how fast you receive them.

Take a moment, send me your email address that hits your phone and I'll add it to our system. Let me know if you have any questions,

John Rainey
The Rainman
901-461-4600
rainman@therainman.com

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