5 Minutes Are 5 Minutes Are 5 Minutes – Or Are They?

I recently noticed how relative time can be. Take 5 minutes for example, is that a long or a short time? I'd say it depends. Here are three examples

  • Waiting 5 minutes in a call center queue seems like ages.
  • Waiting for 5 minutes for a file download to finish because the server is on the other side of the world and has a slow link feels sluggish at best. 
  • But: Waiting for 5 minutes in a doctor's waiting room before it's your turn feels very short.

Now how do the extra 6 seconds required to establish a voice call between two LTE mobiles due to Circuit-switched Fallback (CSFB) feel?

2 thoughts on “5 Minutes Are 5 Minutes Are 5 Minutes – Or Are They?”

  1. imho: loooong

    Because when you even consider calling someone chances are not that bad you have an urgent matter!

  2. My maths teacher at school always explained relativity theory to us as follows: 5 seconds is no time at all kissing your girlfriend but a really long time holding a red-hot poker!

    So back to the mobile world…6 seconds CSFB delay is no time at all if you consider the delay already present in an end to end call setup (especially if paging retries and location queries that may be performed in call setup are taken into account), but if it is your major business customer who is complaining, then it is a really serious issue.

    (But is the delay is perfereable to bleeding edge mVoLTE implementation?)

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