4 ms·

Anyone with telecom knowledge have any idea what this could be?

by cgb223 9y ago

ActsJuvenile 9y ago
It was a minor bug in the NSA text collection program. Don't worry citizen, go back to your scheduled life.
- berbec 9y ago
  This
- nonamechicken 9y ago
  Your comment reminded me of a similar scenario with my Windows 10 PC. One day, I saw lot of computers (100+) listed in my network when I went to network places through Explorer. My laptop was the only one in my network. I don't know if it was a bug in Windows or if my PC was actually part of some unknown n/w. I suspected dd-wrt in my router and immediately went back to manufacturer firmware and formatted my laptop. Never saw that after.
josh2600 9y ago
If it's a group message I believe it's carried over the mms channels so it could be a bug in the mmsc. There are so many layers involved that it's hard to know but I'd guess it's a caching bug somewhere along the line. Source: telecom PM for years.
- richardwhiuk 9y ago
  There's two ways to do multi party messaging - Broadcast SMS, or Group MMS. The later is more likely here, given it's a regular group message. It's most likely to be a bug on one of the MMSCs, but could be a problem elsewhere if the message is getting corrupted in flight. Alternatively, it could be routing issue in a certain set of numbers.
- rizwank 9y ago
  Hey it’s josh! Yes MMSC errors sound right. Or wacky IMS stuff.
kevin_nisbet 9y ago
Not that I really worked on MMS/Group chat systems, I see a lot of speculation that this could be a bug in the MMSC. While I have no reason to believe that it is not the MMSC, another item to consider would be the IMS/RCS systems. I have no idea how ATT specifically has deployed their system and can't remember what vendors they are using, but there is a fairly significant behind the scenes shift towards IP based services in the wireless telco world. Personally, while I was in the industry and IMS was very new (15 months ago), I found these systems to be very immature and unreliable, so I would suspect the newer equipment before the older equipment. Without looking into the issue in detail though, it's really hard to say. Simply speculating it could be caused by any number of problems: 1. If it's really two chat requests at a time, and two users getting crossed, I would suspect the RCS side of things, and the server actually doing the invites to the chat session could have a sort of memory corruption bug that is crossing the requests 2. If it's only a single person, then it could be happening somewhere where numbers get translated or routed. If it were say Enum though (mainly for number portability), I would expect this to affect other types of requests, like a phone call going to the wrong party, not just group chat. 3. There are a number of fairly complicated call flows, for things like interop between users who have IMS, and those who do not. But I'm not really sure how this would fail in crossover between users. 4. There is always the possibility that an Identifier somewhere being used is too short, or two vendors not agreeing on a standard somewhere Anyway's, without digging into some of the signalling, and getting more details, it's pure speculation. What I can say, is with IMS/VoLTE which is what I last worked on in the telco industry, we had quite a few crazy bugs.

Anyone with telecom knowledge have any idea what this could be?

by cgb223 9y ago

Anyone with telecom knowledge have any idea what this could be?

ActsJuvenile 9y ago

It was a minor bug in the NSA text collection program. Don't worry citizen, go back to your scheduled life.

berbec 9y ago
This
nonamechicken 9y ago
Your comment reminded me of a similar scenario with my Windows 10 PC. One day, I saw lot of computers (100+) listed in my network when I went to network places through Explorer. My laptop was the only one in my network. I don't know if it was a bug in Windows or if my PC was actually part of some unknown n/w. I suspected dd-wrt in my router and immediately went back to manufacturer firmware and formatted my laptop. Never saw that after.

josh2600 9y ago

If it's a group message I believe it's carried over the mms channels so it could be a bug in the mmsc. There are so many layers involved that it's hard to know but I'd guess it's a caching bug somewhere along the line. Source: telecom PM for years.

richardwhiuk 9y ago
There's two ways to do multi party messaging - Broadcast SMS, or Group MMS. The later is more likely here, given it's a regular group message. It's most likely to be a bug on one of the MMSCs, but could be a problem elsewhere if the message is getting corrupted in flight. Alternatively, it could be routing issue in a certain set of numbers.
rizwank 9y ago
Hey it’s josh! Yes MMSC errors sound right. Or wacky IMS stuff.

kevin_nisbet 9y ago

Not that I really worked on MMS/Group chat systems, I see a lot of speculation that this could be a bug in the MMSC. While I have no reason to believe that it is not the MMSC, another item to consider would be the IMS/RCS systems. I have no idea how ATT specifically has deployed their system and can't remember what vendors they are using, but there is a fairly significant behind the scenes shift towards IP based services in the wireless telco world. Personally, while I was in the industry and IMS was very new (15 months ago), I found these systems to be very immature and unreliable, so I would suspect the newer equipment before the older equipment. Without looking into the issue in detail though, it's really hard to say. Simply speculating it could be caused by any number of problems: 1. If it's really two chat requests at a time, and two users getting crossed, I would suspect the RCS side of things, and the server actually doing the invites to the chat session could have a sort of memory corruption bug that is crossing the requests 2. If it's only a single person, then it could be happening somewhere where numbers get translated or routed. If it were say Enum though (mainly for number portability), I would expect this to affect other types of requests, like a phone call going to the wrong party, not just group chat. 3. There are a number of fairly complicated call flows, for things like interop between users who have IMS, and those who do not. But I'm not really sure how this would fail in crossover between users. 4. There is always the possibility that an Identifier somewhere being used is too short, or two vendors not agreeing on a standard somewhere Anyway's, without digging into some of the signalling, and getting more details, it's pure speculation. What I can say, is with IMS/VoLTE which is what I last worked on in the telco industry, we had quite a few crazy bugs.