iMessages Go Through - After Long Delay

[ghporter]

My wife and I had this issue crop up on November 7 when we were at a “fun run” 5k event. Messages between us were delayed by about 15 minutes, even though we were within a few hundred meters of each other - and thus almost certainly in the same cell site’s coverage.

It just happened again. I sent her a message at about 1130 local, and her iPad (right next to me on the table I’m sitting at) didn’t alert until almost 1150.

Our phones and iPads are all on OS version 15.1, and we upgraded to this around Halloween.

Anybody else having this issue? How about a fix? I am concerned that this will give us problems when we need to communicate.

We’re going out of town this weekend, and the event we’re attending is big enough that we typically depend on messaging - voice coverage is kinda sketchy, but short data messages tend to work well.

[Thorzdad]

I haven’t seen that today. What I did experience just today is Messages sending as plain SMS to a Contact who absolutely uses an iPhone. Messages in the stream before today were all blue bubbles. Today’s Messages are green bubbles. This is only with texts to one person, who lives way out on the west coast.

[subego]

Notifications have been borked for me since 15.

[Thorzdad]

I haven't made the jump to 15 yet.

[ghporter]

I don’t know if we’re just seeing delayed notifications, or actually delayed messages. We’ll keep an eye on it to see.

Messaging my son’s non-Apple phone seems to go through - and trigger notifications - just fine…

[andi*pandi]

Do you have wifi calling enabled; is bluetooth/wifi on for all devices?

[ghporter]

Bluetooth is on for everything. Wi-Fi calling is not.

[ghporter]

Well we had issues communicating today, but probably not because of this.

We’re at the Texas Renaissance Festival. It’s a huge Ren Faire, possibly the largest in the US by area. Attendance stats for 2016 (the latest I can find online) cite over 660,000 guests over just 9 weekends. Yeah, big.

But it’s physically pretty far from many populated areas, so cell service is “light” at best. They appear to have a mobile cell tower set up for the duration; we get more bars, but texts/iMessages aren’t as well covered as voice. Voice calling worked fine, by the way.

I’m on AT&T, so WiFi calling is an extra thing (on our plan). It looks like hot spot may be too…it’s past time for us to “have a talk with AT&T about why we should stay with them. Especially since our neighborhood may get Google Fiber within the next quarter or so.

[subego]

You’ll pry my AT&T unlimited data plan from my cold, dead fingers.

[ghporter]

Sadly, they nixed my legacy unlimited plan as part of a ploy to “get me a discount” based on my employer - the USAF. I still get the discount, but not unlimited anything. Not that we ever use that much data, but I’m still ticked at the sales drone over 15 years later.

[Thorzdad]

Yeah, AT&T has been gunning after those legacy unlimited plans for years now. Basically, if you make any change, no matter how insignificant, it forces a new plan and the end to unlimited. I had one friend who had a legacy plan, and AT&T kept jacking-up the rates and fees to levels that they really had no other choice but to jump to a more affordable plan and lose the unlimited data.