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We run a remote system and would like the servers to be able to alert us to their status via SMS. Is it possible to setup our own SMS gateway (or our own GSM network) so we DO NOT have to pay for an SMS provider?
Is this possible? if so, please let us know what are the required hardwares and how we get started..
I'm sure this is possible, because when the operator A want to send an SMS to the operator B, it do not pay any cent to the operator B. also, there are ton of online services like: Atompark.com, clickatell, ...etc
please Note: we know how to build an sms gateway using Linux system, a Modem GSM and a valid SIM, but we are looking a way that we do not have to pay any cent for sending sms messages...
Here's How It Works
You >>> Forwarding Aggregator >>> SMS Aggregator >>> Mobile Operator >>> Mobile Company >>> Your Customer
3 Major Parties Are Involved in the Whole Process:
1. Mobile Operators: They Manage SMSC (Short Message Service Centers). AT&T, Sprint/NEXTEL, T-Mobile USA, U.S.Cellular and Verizon Wireless are few of the major mobile operators in the whole world. They have deep connections with all major mobile phone companies. Most of them have 800 to 950 telecommunication/mobile companies in their pannel. All of your messages came to them via SMS Aggregators and they forward them to reciever's Mobile Company which send it to receiver in the end.
Cost of becoming a Mobile Operator: Billion Dollar Business if not Trillion.
2. SMS Aggregators: mBlox, air2web and motricity are few of them. They have deep connections with Mobile operators.
Cost of becoming SMS Aggregator: in Millions
3. Forwarding Aggregators/SMS Gateways: Clickatell, Twilio and esendex and few others are providing SMS Gateway APIs and most of the developers are using Clickatell to integrate its SMS API with their app. They charge different rates for different countries (NO FIXED RATE FOR ALL COUNTRIES). It would cost you rougly around $600-$700 for 100,000 messages (internationally).
Cost of becoming Forwarding Aggregator: May be in Millions
Bottom Line:
I'm working on a FREE solution but till today there are no FREE reliable solution in the whole world to send Bulk Messages for FREE internationally. So stop wasting your time on searching for a FREE solution. You have to come up with a new technology in order to achive this.
Though there are many options to send Bulk messages within your country for FREE or by spending little money but you simply can't achieve this if you're planning to send messages internationally.
Aside from any operator provided email-to-sms system there is no "free" way to do this.
A want to send an SMS to the operator B, it do not pay any cent to the
operator B
This is balanced by the fact that B will not pay A for messages going in the other direction. Internationally they often do pay SMS interconnect fees.
... setup our own SMS gateway
Yes, but you need access to an SMSC on a GSM network to send the messages either directly or via a device with a SIM, thats what you pay for.
or our own GSM network
Not practically, no.
You can use a raspberry pi or Orange pi with a Dongle.Then we can use AT commands.
We can connect the dongle and check whether It is connecting as a right mode using this command.
sudo lsusb
Then we can use python code execute AT commands..
sending sms we can use this code
def sendsms(number,text):
ser.flushInput()
ser.flushOutput()
ser.write('AT+CMGF=1\r\n')
sleep(1)
ser.write(f'AT+CMGS="{number}"\r\n')
sleep(1)
ser.write(f'{text}')
sleep(1)
ser.write(ascii.ctrl('z'))
sleep(1)
ser.flushInput()
ser.flushOutput()
print f"Text: {text} \nhas been sent to: {number}"
read unread sms
def read_unread_sms():
ser.write('AT+CMGF=1\r\n')
sleep(2)
ser.write('AT+CMGL="ALL"\r\n')
sleep(5)
a = ser.readlines()
z=[]
y=[]
for x in a:
if x.startswith('+CMGL:'):
r=a.index(x)
t=r+1
z.append(r)
z.append(t)
for x in z:
y.append(a[x])
##Following line changed modem back to PDU mode
ser.write('AT+CMGF=0\r\n')
return y
we can use "logger" for if you want create a logger file for the sms gateway.If you want to send the unread message to api, we can use "request" module for that.
While there are no free ways to send proper text messages, you might be better off buying an GSM module for a server (usb in racks would not be ideal, but there should be proper hw expansion buses). You would query the module itself rather then relying on a 3rd party middle server to send those messages, saving a notable portion of money.
Though I have not realized this per se, I created this plan for sending text messages for a service of mine. It was by far the cheapest option.
Related
I set up a scheduling website at work which uses Twilio to send out sms messages with each person's next day assignment information as well as a link to the website where notes and everyone's next-day assignment is posted. Occasionally colleagues complain that they haven't received messages. Recently the problem has gotten much worse though is to be limited to people with AT&T and Sprint. People with Verizon and TMobile are get their messages without a problem.
A few more facts:
All of my code works well in testing and is consistent with Twilio's
instructions.
Twilio's logs list the messages as having been sent.
The people who's sms messages are not delivered tend to be at the end
of the alphabet
Anyone have any ideas what might be going on?
SMS messages the twilio logs show as sent which never arrive at the recipient's phone may be filtered by cell phone carriers as part of an effort to reduce spam sms messages. A website that sends out a batch of messages like the scheduling website you (I) describe may be particularly susceptible to such filtering since spam is also sent out in batches. The fact that recipients at the end of the alphabet tend to be blocked rather than those at the beginning might reflect an algorithm which flags earlier messages as suspicious and blocks subsequent ones that appear similar in that they contain the same website link.
In the past I was able to solve this problem by adding a 1 second delay between messages. That worked fine for my purposes. My site sent out the messages as a background job and with the 1 second delay about 25 sms messages get sent out over 2 minutes.
More recently AT&T and Sprint started blocking many more messages, though not all. At Jan 11, 15:04 PST, Twilio's status was aware of the problem and noted:
Identified - Messages with hyperlinks to goo.gl are being filtered on AT&T and Sprint. We are working with these carriers to address this filtering.
I was able to get around this problem by creating a shortened url using Bitly instead of Google's url shortening service.
Of note, Twilio is a great service but in the past their support folks were unaware that spam filtering could be blocking some of my sms messages. That's my prime motivation for posting about this issue here.
It seems that sites like mine can get caught in the crossfire between sms spammers and wireless carriers attempting to block them. Hopefully some day such sms spam filtering will get more sophisticated and stop blocking the messages sent by sites like mine.
I would love to hear if anyone with more sophisticated insight than mine has any comments.
Currently experiencing a really bad carrier filtering case through Twilio. Most messages sent to Verizon numbers are being blocked. According to Twilio support, Verizon recently implemented additional filtering methods to block A2P (Application-to-Peer) traffic.
Given this article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/att-verizon-try-to-prevent-ban-on-text-message-blocking/ it seems like Verizon's more aggressive filtering might be related to the recent repeal of Net Neutrality, and their goal is to make more money by forcing businesses to get a short code.
If your using 10 digit phone numbers I Would also look at this
https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/short-codes/why-would-i-want-a-short-code-instead-of-sending-sms-from-a-regular-us-phone-number-or-phone-numbers
Long codes are meant for person-to-person communications, and can send only 1 message per second. For high-volume, application-driven messaging, Twilio recommends using a short code. Short codes can send SMS and MMS at 30 messages per second, and this high throughput is perfect for applications needing to send time-sensitive messages to many users at once. Furthermore, since carriers vet and approve all short codes for their intended use, they are not subject to carrier filtering or suspension for heavy traffic.
I have a client company with a simple web app that users can interact with via a desktop/mobile website. Recently they asked to implement a notification functionality. The users, if they wish to, can sign up to real time notifications from the web app.
The really interesting requirements though is that the notificaitons should:
Be delivered in real time (60+ seconds delay is a failure);
Have guaranteed delivery, i.e. my client wants to be sure that each user gets all his/her notifications.
Be able to somehow notify the user from background, i.e. a typical user would not wait for a notification with a browser window open on his/her Android, for example. The preferred way is to make the phone ring and/or vibrate and put some messages into the notification area so that a user can notice a notification even if the phone lies in her pocket or a bag.
Notes:
a typical notification message is rather short, here is an example: "Hello! You have a meeting with $John today at $5pm";
all the users have smartphones (iPhone/Android) with 3G connection enabled.
Since the requirement 3 can not be met with the current state of modern mobile browsers, the only two ways to fully achieve the spec is to:
A. Make an app for iOS/Android and use the native APIs to make the
phone ring and vibrate upon notification receipt;
B. Use an IVR like
Asterisk to call the user via SIP, play a sound with notification and
ask him/her to press 1 to confirm the receipt of the notification
(the sound can be something like "You have a meeting with John today
at 5pm. Please press 1 to confirm").
But when I started to test those A and B options, I found that (1) and (2) can not be satisfied via a regular 3G connection (the company is in Europe and the connection is quite okay). For example, a Jabber client on an Android device can get some messages with a long delay (a few minutes) and even loose some messages.
So, the only option left to meet the requirements 1, 2 and 3 is to use B (automated IVR - Asterisk).
Is my reasoning correct? Are any other mechanisms to deliver short notifications to smartphone-enabled users in real time, with 100% guarantee and make the smartphones ring and/or vibrate upon notification? Should I try to use anything else instead of the automated IVR calls?
P.S. I do not consider the SMS technology in my research, since to my knowledge there is no guaranteed delivery of messages.
If all your users have smartphones, your choices are IVR, SMS, or push notifications. If the mobile phone network is unavailable, all bets are off for IVR and SMS, but iOS and Android users may receive push notifications over wifi. If the phone network is present but weak (as in, no 3G or LTE), IVR and SMS are about just as good - SMS may be slightly better, because a bad phone connection can turn your message into "Hello, you have an appointment with KRRRZZZZT today at [call drops]".
Hypothetical: I want to send a single text message to all Verizon phones programmatically. I have multiple email gateways to use (obtained from the all-reliable wikipedia):
number#vtext.com
number#vzwpix.com
number#message.alltel.com
number#text.wireless.alltel.com
number#mms.alltel.net
I don't think that I'm guaranteed that any one of these will work and/or will still be in service (am I?) and I would not like to have to come back and change anything in the code at a later date.
Is there any way that I can make sure that I only send one text message to a given phone number when there are 5 possible gateways?
The only way way (that I know of) to ensure you only deliver one message to the recipient is to try each gateway sequentially until a message sends successfully, like some of the comments mentioned.
However, I've been sending a decent volume (>1500) of messages using #vtext.com lately and haven't noticed any bounces or downtime during sending. I have no way of knowing if every single message was delivered, but none of my test numbers have dropped a message yet. Most US carriers seem to have decent reliability on their gateways these days.
Just remember that SMS is still considered a best-effort service by most carriers. Even if you get your message to their servers successfully, there's no guarantee that the message will make it to its destination.
I'm working on an application that sends and receives SMS messages to and from its users. (Don't worry - it's not spam - every user of the app expects to send and receive these messages).
One key aspect of the app... If a user sends a message to the app, the app then sends that message out to every person on that user's "team". So, the app will be sending a receiving a pretty significant number of messages (I'm hoping for a few thousand users, and 5,000-10,000 SMS messages per day).
I've been experimenting with a number of options:
SMS to email
Connecting a mobile phone to my server
Contracting an SMS gateway
Option 1 is great, since it's free, but it's unreliable (apparently mobile providers queue these messages after SMS messages they can charge for, so they're frequently received late or lost)
Option 2 is also cheap, but the mobile phone can't keep up with the number of messages I'll be sending. Also, the mobile phone provider will consider this volume of messages excessive.
Option 3 is perfect, except that SMS gateway providers charge PER MESSAGE (usually $0.02-$0.06 per), which creates an impossible scaling problem. (Reminds me of the old business adage... "Sure we're losing money on every transaction, but we'll make it up in volume...")
So, long story short - how on EARTH did Twitter pull this off? They've been doing a similar thing (allowing users to exchange SMS messages with the app) since the beginning. Even if they negotiated an INCREDIBLE discount (say, $0.001 per message), they'd be paying an ENORMOUS cost to send the hundreds of millions of messages they handle.
Does anyone have any idea how they did this?
After a bit of Googling, it looks like Twitter has simply been signing deals with cell phone companies in various countries. For example (Twitter blog post link spam incoming):
Australia: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/12/sms-tweets-for-telstra-australia.html
Indonesia: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/sms-for-axis-indonesia.html
New Zealand: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/hello-new-zealand.html
UK: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/full-sms-service-for-vodafone-uk.html
Some more details about SMS in general here.
I am about to start building an SMS alerting function in my web application. The aim is to provide two services:
Host pays - e.g. to send an SMS alerting users to the cancellation of an event
User pays - e.g. to alert that an Email has been sent with, say, details of a new event (apparently a requirement from users when they are away from their EMail systems!)
I also figure that there will be other user-pays scenarios such as if they have secondary mobile phones that they want alerting as the Host will only want to pay for a single phone per user.
From my research:
I can use a 3rd party SMS Gateway provider. Cost is about GBP 0.05 per message. I can either send an EMail to 999999999#TheGatewayProvider.com or I can use an HTTP request with suitable parameters in the URL.
I can send an EMail to the user's network provider (I believe this is only available in the USA)
EDIT: There are variations on how the various providers will handle the From/Subject and Message, so presentation of actual message sent may be hard to predict.
I can set up my own Gateway (which I think is way beyond my ability, and may give grief at our data centre!)
It strikes me that:
EMail we send sometimes get delayed in my server's SMTP queue, let alone any downstream queues. Sending an email to the network provider's SMS gateway seems to often be treated as low priority.
Therefore HTTP to a 3rd party SMS Gateway provider should give me shortest latency (important for "This afternoons event is cancelled because of bad weather")
When I send SMS Text from my mobile occasionally they take days to arrive - I presume this is something we just have to live with?
Having said that we will also have low priority informational messages and sending these by cheapest route is attractive! so I am planning to allow users to enter an EMail address for such messages - the intention being that they will use the email address for their mobile phone company's SMS redirect service, or similar (i.e. the email address of a device, not an inbox).
I also wonder whether allowing the users to enter IM, Twitter or other such is likely to be well used and efficient in practice?
From the 3rd party gateways I have looked at it seems:
Some use higher grade networks than others, this may impact performance? (or is it just marketing hogwash?)
Some provide better feedback than others. I need to keep the arguments over billing - and exactly how many "credits" the client has used up - to a minimum; getting an answerback of "OK" / "Phone number does not exist" therefore strikes me as important. One provider I found creates a text log file daily that can be downloaded and which I could reconcile with my outgoing log.
I would appreciate your opinions and experiences on:
Users will enter their mobile numbers as they know them. Do I need to enforce +9912345... so that I get the country code too?
What happens if the mobile is foreign (I'm based in the UK) Does the recipient pay the international part? or does the gateway provider perhaps have local transmission services?
What do I need to do with non alpha characters? The UK Pound sign "£" and CR / LF spring to mind. If these are encoded might that cause a message right on the length limit to exceed it once encoded (such that I need to build this in to the validation of the message creation form). Are new lines CR+LF or will just CR do?
Do any gateways have simulations? such that I could test my application without incurring any actual costs of SMS texts.
I plan to log the mobile numbers of any failed attempts and flag the user's record so that the next time they login I can encourage them to correct the number.
Any other gotchas and suggestions you have would be much appreciated. Thanks.
The one big gotcha, that has happened to me, although this is not a programming question as such, its just an experience of it, that needs to be taken into account.
When someone sends you a message that is of an urgent meaning, and then the sender (owner of the handset) comes over to you and asked you did you get the message, and this is what irks me, a row can arise because you can claim to not have received it, thus making the sender somewhat feeling miffed/cross/angry that you have "ignored them" or "did not respond" when in fact it is down to the provider's network problems.
And funnily enough, after about an hour after having a row, your handset goes beep, and your message from the sender arrived!!!! This has happened to me several times! But what can I do without ever knowing what is happening on the sender's side of things (crisis, urgent query etc)
So be cautious if sending the message across from ethernet (internet) to the handset as ethernet is not exactly 100% stable (routers go down, dns disappearing, server outages etc) so it is worthwhile to keep this in mind. Like the question is how can you guarantee instant delivery of sms? That's a big question and reliability will have to come in, usually requiring extra effort to do so...
Handsets, most of them usually do, have what is known as a delivery report, some are switched on, some are switched off, that is a useful way of knowing if the recipient's handset is switched on or off, if it's on, you will get an instant delivery report indicating that it was delivered, likewise, if it's off, there will be a noticeable time delay in getting the delivery report, that is dependant on your providers' maximum time for delivery.
Sorry if this seems like a rambling...
Hope this gives you some food for thought,
Best regards,
Tom.
SMS is a telco service, not an Internet service. That comes with some different rules.
For starters, many endpoints are billed/billable, and have contracts with a single service provider. This will include all of your use cases.
Secondly, billing is a contract matter both on the sending and the receiving side. You simply cannot state as a sender that "Host pays", unless you restrict yourself to sending SMS to specific countries. USA is the most famous exception. "Receiver pays" is even worse. Due to SMS spam, telco's will usually allow this kind of traffic only when you have a contract with them.
Third-party SMS operators can deal with many of these problems. It's very easy for them to be more service-oriented than the average telco. They might even be able to deliver international SMS for you.
SMS tends to buffer in the network itself, not necessarily the email gateway. In individual cases, the difference is probably invisible to you. But you would still have delays even if you had a direct SS7 link to the telco.
Real telco's have test gateways, but the terms of use for those I can't give you. The idea though is definitely to be able to test you app at lower costs.
SMS uses its own alphabet, a rather nasty multi-septet encoding (7/14/21 bits!) The quoted 160 character limit comes from a 140 byte payload. This could also be coded as 70 UTF-16 characters.