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SMPP Pricing - 26/05/2008, Admin Comments 0

I've been investigating sms pricing when connecting to operators. We've implemented the SMPP protocol for direct connection to operators and aggregators. The Short Message Peer-to-Peer Protocol (SMPP) is an open, very lightweight, efficient and high performance protocol for sending SMS messages. It also means you can use short codes offered by the operators (that'll be another post).

We'll support v3.4 of the SMPP protocol with 2-way messaging which means you can send/receive sms messages along the same connection. You'll also need a virtual number which the aggregators can supply - usually only from the countries they're based in. With our testing we found it's much much faster and of course, you won't need to fiddle around with trying to get modems to work.

In terms of per message cost there wasn't a lot of difference between the aggregators, the big difference was in setup costs and provision of virtual numbers.  

The indian companies I contacted all seemed way over priced, maybe because I was a foreigner asking about them? A couple of other companies in the UK stood out for pricing and professionalism, www.cardboardfish.com looked the cheapest and www.hslsms.com had good pricing and offered the ability to host your own sim card from your country rather than having to use a virtual number from the country that company is located it. I didn't get a chance to properly evaluate companies in the US, but I will later.  

Hopefully, we'll finish up our testing and get a new release out with this SMPP connection, along with connections to web services quite soon.