Mobile phone - configuration via SMS

Question

In Germany, mobile carriers often provide a simple way to configure your mobile phone for MMS and GPRS: After keying in your phone number and device model on the carrier's website, you get a "configuration sms" sent to you.

I'm trying to understand how that works from a technical standpoint. I have scanned through 3GPP TS 03.40 (http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/html-info/0340.htm), but haven't been able to find much. Also, the fact that one has to provide the phone model indicates that it is a provider specific thing and not standardized?

Does anyone have any pointers for me? Also I'd be interested how the "internet-enabling" process looks like in other countries. Anyone care to share?

Answer 1

Most mobile carriers have a web to SMS system setup at their backend. They have their a SMSC that is gets information from the web site, processes it and sends it to the actual SMSC that serves cell phone users (this is done through SMPP protocol, well, one of the ways it was done when I worked on this a few years back). This is of course different for different carriers and the SMSC are also different but that is the general idea.

For third party developers, there are service providers that can take data from a developer and forward it to a carriers SMSC, thus sending it to cell phone users.

Answer 2

These are called Over-The-Air (OTA) messages and do indeed use SMS as the bearer. More info; http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/tsg_SA/WG3_Security/TSGS3_30_Povoa/Docs/PDF/S3-030534.pdf