T-Mobile USA text timestamp problem in Denver
This is quite an interesting one sent in my an SMS Text News reader and T-Mobile USA customer who can’t quite understand why his 160 character text messages are being delivered with wildly inaccurate timestamps.
Any ideas?
I am not sure if you are aware of this, but shortly after the time change in March, those of us in Arizona noticed that all of our incoming text messages were time stamped an hour ahead of local time. I have contacted their ‘customer support’ folks many times by phone since March, and gotten nowhere. I have e-mailed them numerous times.
Reeeeeeally weird!
Yesterday I was told that it is because we are on the Denver network.
What’s that got to do with anything? 
You’re on the Denver network therefore you should be expecting messages to phase shift in and out of this universe? Is that it?
IF that is the case, why are my incoming texts time stamped correctly? Why does my phone show the correct time? Anyway, I was able to get an e-mail address for the T-Mobile Senior Vice President of Customer Service (Sue Nokes), so I sent her an e-mail.
Right on! Straight to the top!
I received a call from a guy who works in the office of their President. They say that they are going to get it resolved. Incidentally, I have been with T-Mobile for five years now. This is the first time the text messages have been time stamped incorrectly.
Keep us updated.
If you too are on the phase-shifting T-Mobile Denver network, this is why your 9am text message from your girlfriend appears to have been sent at 6am this morning.
Blame it on Arizona for not going on daylight savings time like the rest of the country, so in the summer they’re on Pacific time, not Mountain time (like Denver) as they are the rest of the year.
Posted by carlo on July 13th, 2007 at 1:31 am.I think it may have to do with the fact that the SMS service center for your area is in Denver. A SMS gets sent from your handset to the Denver server, then gets timestamped when sent through, then again at your handset (based on local time). Sounds like something got hincky when they changed the DST settings.
Posted by Chad on July 13th, 2007 at 4:53 am.Internetworking in the US was a big problem for a very long time and one of the reasons which prevented the delay of SMS being taken up. In the end, it was mostly resolved by using some of the larger aggregators (e.g. Sybase365) to handle the messages as inbetweens.
As such, although i’m not too sure about T-Mobile, the problem probably lies there some where. Not that much to worry about though.
Posted by Fahed on July 13th, 2007 at 7:02 am.Sorry folks, but Verizon gets it right. All of my incoming texts on my Verizon phone are time stamped correctly. If they can do it right, why can’t T-Mobile? I feel sorry for the person who sent this in as well as all the other T-Mobile customers in AZ
Posted by Verizon Gets it Right on July 13th, 2007 at 2:50 pm.