SMS Gateway - General Questions on SMS-Website Communication

Question

Hi Guys,

I'm asking this question with little/no knowledge of SMS gateways and it's relevant technologies, so bear with me.

What i want is this:

1. User Sends an SMS to a given number
2. This SMS is forwarded to my website for processing

So from the (little) research i've done, it looks like i need to pay for an SMS Gateway.

Any recommendations? Known limitations?

My website will be an ASP.NET MVC application running over IIS7.

I dont need to SEND sms's from my website, only receive them.

I have no idea if this is even possible - can an SMS gateway send messages to a website over HTTP? What about images? What type of network infrastructure is required on my end?

At this stage, all i really care about is the body of the message, and who sent it. But of course i want to future-proof myself so looking to know the pitfalls up front.

Once the website receives the SMS over HTTP, i need to persist this to a SQL Server 2008 database. Or can the SMS gateway persist to it's own DB?

Can anyone provide any guidance? Anyone done this type of thing before?

Appreciate the help.

Answer 1

You need an SMS gateway that can assign you a number and forwards that number onto a web service, or other resource you publish according to their standard.

In Australia a few providers do this (most of them bundle it as "Two Way" SMS so you get Send as well, even though you've said you don't need it).

• http://www.esendex.com.au/Services/SMS-API/Features
• http://www.smsglobal.com/en-au/sms/two_way_sms.php

Are two examples. I've used SMS Global before and it's pretty easy to get going.

You'll need a web server that can publish a service (depending on the gateway the requirements differ), but generally its REST or SOAP or plain GET with parameters. When the gateway receives an SMS on your number it hits the configured URL passing the data to it.

Your service that receives the hit from the gateway will then interpret the parameters, and you can persist that to your database as you wish.

Depending on how many SMS's you're getting you may need to farm it out, but its the same capacity planning that goes into any web presence. The load is just an HTTP request to a resource on your server per message.