I'm looking for a way to do wireline access to send and receive
cellular phone short message service (SMS) messages. Despite all my
google-fu, I have had limited luck finding anyone that meets my needs,
so I'm hoping someone here has found the path through. My main
criteria are:
1. Low quantity, high reliability. I'll want a few dozen phone numbers
and effectively I'll be sending to and receiving from phones I own.
2. Wireline delivery to Honolulu and Northern Virginia. Dynamically
move numbers between the two locations for failover purposes.
3. U.S. based carrier. Tying in to the SMS system via Europe isn't
acceptable to my customer.
4. Solution must reach phones on all U.S. cellular carriers.
5. Price is a very distant fifth criteria to the preceding four.
I can consider Internet based systems where the provider uses U.S.
based facilities and ties in to a U.S. phone network, provided that my
standards of reliability and redundancy are met by their
infrastructure.
Alternately, I can also consider a wireless carrier that can provide
two SIM-based phones with the same phone number for sending and
receiving SMS messages. I'd put the sims in a pair of modems and
manage deduplication of the received messages in software.
Has anybody had any luck with this kind of requirement? Which vendors
should I talk to and who at the vendor?
If these are your phones, you will be controlling the carrier. If they are all one carrier, you can find out how to send to that carrier. For other uses where you don't control the carrier, it becomes a nightmare and where you may want to get a service provider to do that for you.
Most carriers have a way to send messages directly to phones and I use a phone from one specific carrier that has access via modems(using TAP protocol and I use qpage(www.qpage.org)). You can also use qpage via a public(but carrier specific) snpp server, but I have not had a need for that as I need/want off Internet delivery of messages to the carrier's network.
On the expensive side, lookup 'sms short code' and you will see information on how that works and more info on service providers in this area.
Have you looked at Google Voice much? I have mine set up to SMS all my
devices, including email delivery, and can enable/disable devices as
needed. The big benefit, is that I have an inbox full of all my old inbound
and outbound text messages.
It might be that I am missing a key element, but it looks like you want a
virtual (VoIP) SMS number, and be able to decide which devices in the US
receive the messages.
Google voice is a fine service and if they sold it with an API, I
might well buy it. As a free public service with a strictly unofficial
API, I can't seriously consider using it in my product's critical
path. I need a service whose provider is actually obligated to keep it
working to the standard of resilience typical of the rest of my
system.
Let me put it another way: with google voice, google mail, google
search you are not the customer. You're the product. I use gmail for
my personal mail and I can live with that. For business services, I
need to be the customer.
Have you figured out how to get AT&T to give you two SIMs with the
same phone number? I'm using a different set of multitech modems now
but I need the same, I guess the terminology is "SMS long code," at
both sites.
> Have you looked at Google Voice much? I have mine set up to SMS all my
> devices, including email delivery, and can enable/disable devices as
> needed. The big benefit, is that I have an inbox full of all my old
inbound
> and outbound text messages.
++1 on Google Voice.
Hi Steve,
Google voice is a fine service and if they sold it with an API, I
might well buy it. As a free public service with a strictly unofficial
API, I can't seriously consider using it in my product's critical
path. I need a service whose provider is actually obligated to keep it
working to the standard of resilience typical of the rest of my
system.
Let me put it another way: with google voice, google mail, google
search you are not the customer. You're the product. I use gmail for
my personal mail and I can live with that. For business services, I
need to be the customer.
FWLIW - I think that is a bit harsh, even if mostly accurate.
I love GVoice for sending & receiving texts across multiple devices, some
of which aren't cellular - or wired - at all :).
*(Also have phone calls ring not just my phones, but Skype and GChat as
well ...)*
I will need to look into the Google Apps for business part of the voice
product. I have not really tried apps accounts yet.
As far as APIs go, it looks like most are "unofficial", but there is
community support.
Check googlevoice.org and also code.google. com/p/pygooglevoice for
examples of what can be accomplished today.
The Canada part is a showstopper, but it should be fairly easy to use a for
exit node in the US to allow you to sign up for a US number. I do know that
US users can still call all of Canada for free through the end of this
year.
My gut feel is that the telcos are what is keeping Google from releasing
the product to a broader audience, e.g. more countries than the US.
Avoid Google Voice. I've seen other recommendations on this, and it's
horrid. Most solutions are no longer updated, there is no official API from
Google, and Google changes their products regularly where stuff breaks. To
suggest it as a critical production solution blows my mind.
Instead, purchase a cellular USB modem with a standard plan. All 4 major
carriers provide APIs to interact with the modems, and you get everything
you need. They aren't cheap (something in the neighborhood of $30/month),
but they work, they are reliable, and you have a committed telecom corp
dedicated to keeping uptime high, and the API up-to-date.
Look at TextMagic. They have an easy to work with API and the cost is
minimal. If you are using it for monitoring purposes, you'll just have to
figure out how to do it out of band.
They're in the UK. You might take a look at Aerialink
who are in the US:
Getting your own cellular modem may well end up being
more reliable and cheaper in the long run, since you are
less at the mercy of other people's software.
I have a system in place based on just under a dozen Multitech GSM
modems in a room by a window. It works... more or less.
It has no provisions for equipment or site failure. The modem breaks,
that number is unavailable. The site fails, that number is
unavailable. The local cell network gets jammed, the number is
unavailable. That's the opposite of "high availability."
So, I need to replace it with something that offers high availability
for each phone number, aka "SMS long code." I realize that the phone
end will still suffer all the vagaries of SMS. But on the base end I
need high availability.
I expect this to cost more than throwing a dozen GSM modems in a room.
I won't be offended when it does.
Anyway, I want to thank everybody for the suggestions, public and
private. You've given me some solid leads I can pursue. I'll let you
know how it turns out.
What about finding someplace offsite and setting up a persistent PPP
connection with modems (of the POTS variety) between it and home base?
Put half the modems there and maybe a low power Atom server with hooks
to send alerts like "connection to home hasn't come back after X redials".
I do something similar by having cheap DSL with a provider I don't have
any other services with to provide a outside world view of things. I
have a POTS line there too that can auto-dial back home if needed.
