Saturday, April 2, 2011

How Does an SMS Gateway Work?

An SMS gateway is a method of sending or receiving a text message without a mobile phone. The gateway works by taking a message in a different format, converting it to the Short Message Service format (or SMS), then transmitting it over a mobile network. It can also function in the other direction, taking an SMS and converting it to another format, like email. SMS gateways are very useful because they streamline mobile communication between service providers.
One of the major issues with SMS is that companies use their own SMS communication systems. Most of these systems are company-specific and are not designed to communicate with each other. This can solve this problem by translating one SMS communication protocol into another. This gateway allow one mobile service provider to send an SMS message to another service provider without having to translate it themselves.
For mobile application developers, this gateways are vital to their communication strategy. If a developer wants to use SMS, they need to design their program to support many different communication protocols. This can be very costly and time intensive, especially for smaller developers. By offloading the task of communication with different protocols to a gateway, the developer can focus on their specific application. They don't have to write additional code for their program either; they can send SMS messages directly to the gateway and let the gateway handle the translation.
SMS gateways are used in many different areas. For example, if a popular TV show wants to allow their viewers to vote on an issue, they can use this to make it easy. Viewers can send an SMS message to a predetermined number, indicating their choice. The gateway handles the translation, so the network just needs to tabulate the votes. Another example is the email to SMS gateway. Some service providers have a special email address associated with each mobile number, usually in the format of "(mobile#)@carriername.com". These are network-specific SMS gateways designed to take emails and convert them to SMS messages.
These are a critical part of mobile network communication. They give consumers the ability to communicate quickly and easily with users on different mobile networks. Developers and network providers can also use them to facilitate inter-network data communication. With the variety of communication protocols in use, This gateways will continue to serve an important role in network communication.

About the Author

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4 comments:

  1. I always wondered how this worked
    my friend used to text my from her aim or yahoo or something
    always tripped me out

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  2. Ah yeah.. Did this all the time when my cell was out of service. Pretty useful when you need information at that very moment.

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  3. This might be a bit over my head, but I'm trying!

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  4. Very interesting stuff, always wondered how networks translate SMS messages between themselves.

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