Complex message translations with SMS gateways
SMS gateways have had an enormous impact on mobile communications. According to the Gartner research company, close to 11 billion SMS messages will be received in Australia in 2011. However, because of SMS gateways, these billions of personal, business and financial messages will not necessarily have to be sent from other cellular phones. By acting as ‘translators’, SMS gateways enable communication between the different devices used by SMS message senders and receivers, from mobile phones to software applications.
This ‘translation’ is especially useful when transmitting messages between different wireless networks, which generally utilise disparate proprietary protocol software and thus cannot ‘speak’ to each other. SMS gateways are responsible for ‘translating’ the senders’ protocols into the language protocol of the receiving network or SMS Centre (SMSC). SMS gateways offer a variety of ways for businesses, organizations, developers and mobile operators to connect through the SMS gateway’s application programming interfaces (APIs). These flexible interfaces ensure that any application, can be SMS-enabled, regardless of the programming language used. SMS gateways are also used by application developers, so that the need to include multiple protocols in software design is eliminated, saving developers valuable time.
Mobile banking is a good example of the use of the SMS gateway APIs. Every day, thousands of mobile banking customers, who have just swiped their credit cards or are processing transactions online, receive a notification or authorisation SMS from their bank. For the bank, this is usually an automated process, set up on an online database and sent through a computer server via their Short Message Peer to Peer (SMPP) protocol API. The SMS gateway then ‘translates’ that automated computer-generated message, into an SMS that is sent to the customer.
When choosing an SMS gateway, it is worth the application developer looking at the following points:
Determine the cost per message sent and check if there are any hidden costs such as set-up fees or admin charges. Ask if there are minimum purchasing requirements and will pre-bought credits expire after a certain time period. Does the SMS gateway support your particular protocol? What is the extent of their network reach? In other words, can they reliably deliver your important message to wherever it needs to go? Do they offer good technical support and back-up, and is it possible to test the system for free before buying? Ascertain if they can support 2-way SMS or premium-rated short code numbers, if this is what you will be requiring.
Use an SMS gateway to reliably deliver your important mobile messages.
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Tags: 2 way sms, Clickatell, mobile banking, mobile messages, SMPP API, SMS, SMS API, SMS gateway, SMS gateway APIs, SMS Gateways
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