Another way is, if you are sending less than 50 messages a day, via carrier email gateways.
In the US, almost every phone has a unique email address. Sprint is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tmobile is something like [EMAIL PROTECTED] You get the idea. Knowing the MSISDN (phone number) of the user and their carrier would allow you to generate email messages that would be sent to the users phone as a text message.
Benefits? No cost, no gateway to set up or manage, no expensive deals ($2000/month or a high price per message, like .10c US) with aggregators.
Cons? Not reliable delivery always, carrier could block your sending address or IP block for any or no reason if you sent too many messages, no contacts with/through the carriers.
You can handle opting in and out with web forms, or have users send a properly formed email from their phones. Or use a WAP site (recommend php-based hawhaw.inc library to get started) to allow them to unsubscribe/subscribe.
You will run into number portability issues -- someone says they are on AT&T, then they switch to tmobile later and never tell you -- you still send to at&t and they never get the alert. There is a DB run by neustar for US number portability dips, but that also costs $$$, but they give you the carrier for any US cell number.
Beckman
On Sat, 29 Jan 2005, Stipe Tolj wrote:
Hi Tom,
I apologize in advance if my question seems obvious and out of place. I am new to SMS and have had some difficulty in finding sources of information that explain how the SMS system works and what approaches are best for solving particular problems.
now, SMS is a slight part of GSM specs, and, yes, it's a hard piece of work getting all together in mind ;)
We are interested in using SMS on campus to deliver crime alerts to mobile phones of our students, faculty and staff. In order to do this, we obviously need to have their phone number. Do we also need to collect who their wireless carrier is, or is the number sufficient?
Actually you either need their MSISDNs (mobile station numbers) or let them "opt-in/out" to the service via SMS itself. Like letting them send "alert crime start" for having them subscribing to the "list" and "alert crime stop" for unsubscribing. Just an example.
AFAIK, the US has also number portability, which means you can't identify the operator of a MSISDN via it's network prefix. So, it "may" be hard to determine their operator without having access to a number portablity database. (which I know of the VeriSign telecom group is operating in Kansas City).
Our campus computing infrastructure runs on Sun Solaris Unix and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are not interested in running a Windows server based product.
same with us ;)
We will probably have to establish a relationship with a SMSC in order to deliver these SMS messages to students. How does one go about finding appropriate vendors for doing this?
Now, you basically have 2 alternatives:
a) connect to every carrier you want to support. Which is the "hard way". Espacially in the US, where carriers still have some issues with european-well-known protocols like SMPP and/or EMI/UCP.
This would imply that when your application receives an SMS MO (mobile originated) with a subscribtion request, you get also "the route" of the message and hence the orginating carrier for the MSISDN.
b) us an aggregator, which leaverages the difficulties of option a) for you. You only connect to that aggregator and route message transparently to the various carries via the aggregator.
Decission matrix for a) or b) depends on cost, performance and reliablility of the aggregator.
Stipe
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