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NowSMS Support Forums ⬆ MMS & SMS Technical Discussions (unsupported) ⬆ Archive through February 03, 2005 ⬆ |
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| Author | Message | |||
| mdtoxy Unregistered guest |
I work for a startup in the U.S. developing Java apps for mobile phones. When a new user registers with us, we'd like to use WAP Push to get our app onto the user's phone. We actually used to have this working using a third-party SMS provider. We've done most of our testing on T-Mobile, although we have also used AT&T. As of 1 January 2005, though, our provider stopped being able to send SMS to our T-Mobile phones. Apparently, the North American carriers now only accept SMS messages from outside their network if they're sent via a "common shortcode" -- www.usshortcodes.com. (Can anyone else confirm this? This doesn't sound right to me, but it's what our provider told us.) At the moment, we're only sending a few SMSes per day, so we're reluctant to pay for a shortcode. So, we're looking for alternatives. We've been playing with an evaluation version of NowSMS. It's really easy to set up, and it works really well! Using a T-Mobile SIM with either a Nokia 6600 (connected via IRDA) or a Nokia 7610 (connected via USB cable) we can send WAP Pushes to phones on T-Mobile's network. If we swap the T-Mobile SIM for an AT&T SIM, we can WAP Push to AT&T phones. Of course, we can't WAP Push to AT&T phones using a T-Mobile SIM or vice-versa. (We haven't tried Cingular yet.) But presumably, we could get a SIM and a phone for every carrier we want to support and hook them up to NowSMS. Then if we ask our customers to tell us what carrier they're using, we can just send the WAP Push using the appropriate "Sender" in the URL. This will get us started. When we get to the point where we need to send more SMSes than this setup can handle, the hope is that we'll also be making money, and we can pay someone the big bucks they're asking. :-) One question: for how long will this approach be viable? Are the North American carriers going do something to shut us down this way as well? Could they (for example) stop allowing regular customers (like us) from sending binary SMSes? There must be lots of other people and small businesses in this situation. We would really like to use a third-party provider to do all of this, but if that's no longer possible, we'd be happy to settle for using NowSMS or something like it. But, not if as soon as we buy NowSMS and the hardware we need, that solution will stop working as well. Any predictions about the future of SMS in North America? Or, are we just confused, and going with a different provider would solve our problem? | |||
