Why is my iPhone 5 receiving messages late?

So I've recently gotten a T-mobile iPhone 5 & it's been fine the first month but outta no where my messages started to come in late. Sometimes 2-3 hours later. I tried everything from soft and hard reset. Anyone know the problem or how I can fix this? Is it the phone, or service problem?

Its probably the service because t-mobile really sucks. They are so horrible. You can go to t-mobile and see if everything is on.

What did your carrier say?

Unless you or someone else has set your phone to poll the sever for messages every few hours (for a longer battery life) instead of the usual hourly or more frequently, then the delay is down to either your network, your local cell mast, or if the delayed messages are all from one other network then they could be the source of delay.

Regular SMS and MMS messages are asynchronous communications (i.e. Not instant); although they're often received immediately there's no guarantee of that and they always come second to voice calling on the network bandwidth. So they can take minutes or even hours to get to the recipient when the networks are busy (such as the New Year's Eve texting Hell or after a major news event).

But if your messages are regularly delayed by a long time, and you are sure your phone settings are correct, then check with your network. Whenever I've had the same problem with various networks the fault has often been with the local cell mast, but occasionally it has just been down to a particular network having insufficient local resources to cope with the number of their customers in a given area.

There's another possibility: with the iP5 and other 4G LTE capable phones, users are sometimes tempted to set their phone to use 4G only in the mistaken belief that it will give a faster service connection. But 4G networks are still in their infancy and coverage is limited: the signal also has much poorer penetration into buildings compared to 3G. So when a 4G LTE phone is set that way, everything may be delayed if the phone settings won't allow it to default to 3G or even 2G signals.