2 way SMS

chopsuey

chopsuey

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Could somebody please point me to a company that could provide a 2 way SMS service/gateway.


1) I want to send/recieve SMS messages through online serves like BulkSms to internal users (ie. this is not a campaign/revenue share thing) by means of an HTTP web service/API.

2) Each message send will contain a question to witch the receiver should reply to with a YES or NO.

3) I want to match up the send message (question) with the relevant response (answer)

4) This service should be supported on all South African Mobile Service Providers.


* As far as I understand this should be possible and we need to rent a Tagged VMN range or at least a single Tagged VMN if we include a "ref tag" in the reply.


I've tried BulkSMS (they don't support VMNs in South Africa) and ClickATell (waiting on more info) so far, but have had no joy yet.


Any suggestion of a company that provide this 2 way taggable sms service ?


PS: I'm only interested in the sms gatway service, the application will be developed by ourselves.
 
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you just need to rent a short-code and then use a sms gateway (such as Clickatell) to manage your inbound/outbound messages. when a user sends a message to your short-code, the SMS-gateway company routes the message through to your application via a defined API (HTTP/S, FTP, SOAP etc). As far as I know, it is not possible to correlate a user's response with a message he/she received - i.e. if you run two campaigns "Reply YES to subscribe to books" and "Reply YES to subscribe to DVDs" and both are running off the same short-code, your application will not be able to determine if the "YES" received was now for books or DVDs.

The only way you can do this is by getting the user to type "YES DVDS" / "YES BOOKS" or something similar into the SMS. It would be nice if an outbound SMS could contain a unique identifier which tags such a SMS and replying to it would return that identifier. AFAIK this is not possible and the closest you get is by unique message content (i.e. different keywords) and possibly checking the source phone-number of the message.

I could also receive one of your campaign SMS's, but then choose to reply with another phone - just factor things like this in. We are using Clickatell and aside from the high cost, the integration just works.
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
you just need to rent a short-code and then use a sms gateway (such as Clickatell) to manage your inbound/outbound messages. when a user sends a message to your short-code, the SMS-gateway company routes the message through to your application via a defined API (HTTP/S, FTP, SOAP etc). As far as I know, it is not possible to correlate a user's response with a message he/she received - i.e. if you run two campaigns "Reply YES to subscribe to books" and "Reply YES to subscribe to DVDs" and both are running off the same short-code, your application will not be able to determine if the "YES" received was now for books or DVDs.
Click to expand...

If you use a what is called a VMN range (basically a cell number that you could append digits to) you can send messages A so it seems to come from +27 82000000 0001 and message B from the number +27 82000000 0002. So the receiver actually replies to different "receive from" numbers. Both replies lands up in the same inbox on the gateway.

Funny thing is this sort-of works with BulkSMS's web interface. Each message send contains a different send from cell number and if you reply from a cell phone to the message it is associated with the original send message. The only problem is I don't have control over the "send as" number, it auto increments and I don't know when it will roll over. (so, BulkSMS actually have a VMN range, but are only for their own use)

The only way you can do this is by getting the user to type "YES DVDS" / "YES BOOKS" or something similar into the SMS.
Click to expand...

Yip this is the second less elegant option, but there are funny terms of services connected to using short codes like minimum volume that I did not like, but might have to use it.
 
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chopsuey said:
If you use a what is called a VMN rage (basically a cel numer that you could append digits to) you can send messages A so it seems to come from +27 82000000 0001 and message B from the number +27 82000000 0002. So the receiver actually replys to different "receive from" numbers. Both replies lands up in the same inbox on the gateway.
Click to expand...

K - did not know that. Clickatells API provides you with an option to provide you with a source-address to which a user can respond (which is set in the SMS header) - this would probably solve 90% of the problems.
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
Clickatells API provides you with an option to provide you with a source-address to which a user can respond (which is set in the SMS header) - this would probably solve 90% of the problems.
Click to expand...

Yip I noticed the source-address option (I'm currently using ClickATell for some simple outgoing sms testing), it is also present in BulkSMS's API, but it is not supported in South Africa ;-(


* What I need is the ability to rent a VMN (source-address) range in South Africa.
 
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You could also use a GSM modem connected to a PC at your site. Going this way you can also get sms's at a much cheaper rate than through the bulk providers. PM me if you want more info
 
Some feedback to interested folks.

Firstly, thanx for all the suggestions, might have a closer look if prototyping with BulkSMS api do not work out (.. but I doubt that)

As stated above, I have chosen to give BulkSms a try, they do not offer rent-able VMN/LongNumer ranges (in South Africa), but one can use the incremented long-number/sender-id that is generated automatically with every message send. (so basically use BulkSMS own long-number range)

There are some obvious limitations to this solution, eg long-number range will at some point roll-over and send message's sender-id will expire after 30 days. But this should not be an issue for my application.

There are also no extra costs involved in using the the generated long-numbers.

PS: I was very impressed by the guys manning the BulkSMS support email. Great technical response to my list of question and very eager to assist, even gave me a bunch of credits to test the service. (Sadly, I can NOT say the same about ClickATells's service. Still waiting on a quote, 2/3 weeks later, for renting a VMN range)
 
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Thanks for the feedback. Let us know how it goes with BulkSms. I only had positive exchanges with customer-service/technical-service @ Clickatell. I did find though that for more challenging questions you had to pick up the phone instead of an email though....
 
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