| SMS system setup questions |  Search
|
|
NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ NowSMS Support - SMS Issues ⬆ Archive through September 15, 2003 ⬆ |
◄ ► |
| Author | Message | |||
| Olaf |
Question from customer: What are the advantages of using our own (SMS) gateway instead of the operator's? We have to send out the messages via an operator anyway....? | |||
| Olaf |
Additional question: Does the gateway perform email to SMS functionality, or is the email integration only available for MMS? | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support (Bryce) |
It all depends on what services the operator provides as part of their SMS gateway service. If they provide sufficient tools for you to send the types of messages that you need to send, then you're happy as Larry, and you don't need a separate gateway. If you need specialized formats (WAP Push, MMS, other binary SMS), you might need a gateway for that. Or if you need to connect via SMPP or UCP (or one of the other SMSC protocols that we don't support yet), then a gateway can simplify your setup there as well. -bn | |||
| Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support (Bryce) |
Currently we're only doing e-mail to MMS. E-mail to SMS is a rather simple process ... it would actually take our engineers us less than a day to implement it. However, it wouldn't really be two way, which is pretty limiting. Our view of what an e-mail to SMS gateway should provide, is two way communication. So if someone sends an e-mail message to an SMS user, the SMS user should be able to simply click reply and reply back to the e-mail address. Unfortunately, to do that reliably, you really need at least 20 different "sender" addresses for the gateway to use, so that when a user replies, the gateway can determine which user to reply to. 20 addresses is pretty unwieldy for a GSM modem setup, but it is certainly practical for a direct SMSC connection. So we're considering this as a type of add-on module for the gateway. If you have an interest, or a customer has an interest in this type of capability, then you should contact us directly. (E-mail nowsms@now.co.uk for starters.) That said, if you're looking at one-way e-mail to SMS as a sort of broadcast mechanism ... where everything gets sent from a single phone number, and any messages sent to that phone number get routed to a particular pre-configured e-mail address ... our engineers have told me this is pretty simple to implement. But we'd probably want to make sure that we understand your requirements before we start an implementation ... so again, I'd encourage you to contact us and more clearly define your requirements. (E-mailing nowsms@now.co.uk is a good starting point.) -bn | |||
