Need recomm. for web-to-SMS provider with excellent coverage and gr...

Need recomm. for web-to-SMS provider with excellent coverage and gr... SearchSearch
Author Message
HB
Unregistered guest
Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2004 - 09:17 am:   

Hi


I am building a social network / dating website;

I want to be able to send automatic SMS messages at various trigger points to my members alerting them to this and that news. Members as
you can imagine will be ALL OVER THE WORLD including most of the USA, Europe, Middle East, Indonesia, Australia..etc.

I need to find the vendor that has:

1- the most comprehensive network coverage in the industry WORLDWIDE and most reliable -
a network that covers the main operators in most countries. No 'Perfect', 'No Holes' networks exist..but I want the closest thing to it. Can you help? who are the top sms providers out ther for web to mobile?

**IMPORTANT** It has been hard for me to find a vendor that can near fully service the USA and the rest of the world. Most have networks and services to GSM operators.
No one has a perfect coverage map with ZERO holes, but I want to get very close to it.


2- Solution has to fit into my website nicely = i.e. no names of third party vendors should be visible. solution needs to be seamless to user. How does that work technically / API ??? What information do I need exactly to communicate to the person building my site?

4- Lastly, I need to be able to send SMS messages in English and other
languages: such Arabic, Turkish..etc.. Please take that into account and let me know what I need to do to be able to do that. (Unicode??) how does it work ?

Thanks all for helping out!!

HB
if possible, please reply to funnyman7654@yahoo.com. If not, here is fine.
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 1806
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2004 - 07:18 pm:   

1-Sorry, but I can't really recommend any specific service providers. Maybe some trolls will send you proposals for their services via e-mail.

FWIW, I know that a lot of people who need global service use multiple SMS service providers. They might use one provider as a primary, but then route messages for specific countries to other providers because of either better coverage or better rates.

That's one of the advantages of using a middleware solution like NowSMS, in that you can define different paths (service providers) for different international prefixes. And you can easily update the NowSMS config when you want to make service provider changes.

2-The API is going to vary based upon the service provider(s) that you decide to use. Many of the higher grade providers use SMS specific protocols like SMPP (which are good for being able to have full control over the message content, especially if you're sending any binary messages). And almost every provider has some sort of HTTP interface, although the specifics of the HTTP interface will vary from provider to provider.

For an HTTP interface, the scripts on your web server need to be able to issue their own HTTP requests to submit messages to the SMS service. This is relatively easy to do in either PHP or ASP. But like I say, the specifics of the HTTP interface (parameter formatting, etc.), are going to be SMS provider specific.

Specifications for submitting to the Now SMS/MMS Gateway via HTTP can be found at the following links:

http://www.nowsms.com/documentation/ProductDocumentation/sending_messages/sendin g_text_messages.htm
http://www.nowsms.com/documentation/ProductDocumentation/sending_messages/url_pa rameters_for_sending_messages.htm

NowSMS is a middleware tool, so if you were using it, you would submit messages to it via HTTP ... and NowSMS would then submit the messages to the service provider(s) that you configure, based upon the routings that you configure.

4-The following thread includes tables that show the characters that are part of the standard GSM SMS character set:

http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/1103.html

An SMS message can contain 140 bytes (8 bit bytes) of data.

As long as your message includes only characters in the two tables shown in that thread, you can fit 160 characters per SMS message (longer messages can be concatenated with 153 characters per SMS). 160 (7 bit) characters are squeezed into 140 (8 bit) bytes.

If you need to send any characters outside of those tables (such as Arabic), then your message must be submitted in Unicode format. In Unicode format, each character requires 16 bits, and this leaves you with a limit of 70 characters per SMS message.

How you submit Unicode messages may be service specific.

When submitting to NowSMS, we suggest that you use UTF-8 encoding for submitting messages to NowSMS. NowSMS will then determine automatically whether to use Unicode encoding, or if standard 7-bit encoding will work. (You can also submit to NowSMS using a variety of other character sets ... details in the following thread http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/315.html.)

-bn