SMS traffic is doubling in every two years. Operators used to see this as a new revenue source. Many companies started offering services around SMS. But this explosive growth of SMS has started to created problems, mainly a degradation of the voice services.
Every operators are facing service problems during holidays and festival seasons just because of the large volume of SMS messages that are being sent. During New year almost every network will be jammed from 11:45 to 12:15. Every subsriber will be busy. This is not because everyone is calling up each other, but because the SMS traffic is blocking the voice services.
GSM networks use control channels and voice channels for handling calls and SMS messages. The control channel is used to handle SMS messages and also to setup calls. Once the call setup is finished the call proceeds using the voice channel.
Control channels have far lesser bandwidth than voice channels.
When lots of messages are pushed into the network the control channels will become busy and no control channel will be available for call setup. So all the voice services fail.
[...] an earlier post we saw how GSM networks are jammed when the SMS traffic increases. Now some smart kids can use this loop hole to attack GSM networks [...]
Pingback by SMS DOS attack on cellular networks | Kenney Jacob — August 23, 2007 @ 5:52 pm