SMS Activity Feedback

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

February 24, 2006 [24170 views]

Over 120 of you completed this week’s activity on time. Well done! It is clear that some of you found it hard, particularly some of the questions. I have reviewed your answers and before I try to answer them myself I would like to make some general comments.

Finding the right technical level to express your answers is particularly hard. Some of you provided more detail than I needed. Remember this module is about business and therefore pitch your answers at the level you imagine a consultant would use.
Try and turn the material you find into your own words rather than cutting and pasting from the web. Simply copying the answers won’t result in you creating a mental picture of what is going on.
Get better at searching the web. We almost need a course on this now because it is becoming vital for all subjects and for our daily lives. You need to get cleverer at asking questions. There are hundreds of sites offering SMS and these were not what you needed. You need to learn to use the advanced features of the search engine like adding negative search terms.

How does SMS work between phones?

Several key ideas here. Messages are sent (over part of the control channel) from the handset via a cell tower and the network to a SMSC, an SMS Centre, where they are routed towards their destination. This may be another handset, another SMSC or another network. Messages are stored until they can be delivered (up to a maximum time). When your friend turns on their phone, the network identifies their location and forwards any messages to that cell. SMS messages have to be short because the control channel is mainly used to sending timing, billing and handshaking information.

Free SMS sites

You found many different sites that allowed you to send free SMS. Note that in the UK networks at least, SMS is not free as one network has to pay another network an interconnect charge to deliver the message (less than 1p per message). Anyone offering free SMS is therefore hoping to use their ‘free’ offer to entice you to spend some money. This may require you to register, agree to accept advertising or pay for some other service.

Here are a few of the sites you found: http://www.cbfsms.com/, http://www.fonetastic.com/, http://www.sms.ac, http://www.o2.co.uk

How do Internet generated SMS messages work?

You type your message into a form which is ‘posted’ to a web server. This web server packages up your message (and probably others) into a structured data format (probably XML) which is then set via an SMS gateway to an SMSC. The company offering ‘free’ or paid for SMS has a commercial agreement with the gateway which allows them to send in these bulk messages. They are routed as before from the SMSC to their destination. Replies work in the same way with an agreement from the SMSC’s to send messages to specific numbers via the gateways where they are converted into XML and sent to a web server for processing.

How then do “SMS voting” systems work?

As we have just seen messages generated within the mobile network can be sent via an SMS gateway as XML data to an Internet server. When messages arrive at the server an application can sort them based on originating number, destination number (perhaps a shortcode) or keyword. This application could tally up votes and could initiate a thank you message if required.

What is “reverse billing”?

With reverse billing (or Mobile Terminated Billing) the recipient agrees to pay a charge to receive the message. The originating company must be able to prove that they have an agreement from the recipient that allows them to make this charge. This is used as a payment mechanism for alerts and messaging services and the revenue is split between a network operator and the company providing the service.

How would a “news alert over SMS” business work?

We can put all of these ideas together to generate a business that sends alerts. It could be horoscopes, quizzes, news, share prices, scores or any other valuable information for which there is a market.

Firstly the customer must sign up; over the web, by responding to an SMS or via a mobile Internet site (often part an the operator portal such as Orange World). Sometimes the offer will be advertised in newspapers and subscription will be initiated via a sign up message (with a keyword).

The alerts are likely to be entered via a web front end or generated from a database. They are packaged together with the subscriber numbers and sent in XML to an SMS gateway and from there to the subscribers.

Payment is via subscription (web), free (paid by the originators) or reverse billed (if agreed). The companies operating such services are buying bulk SMS cheaply so that even if they only charge standard SMS rates they make a small margin on each message.

The service must make it easy for the subscriber to stop their subscription; often via a reply keyword such as stop.

Is SMS cheaper or more expensive than making a call?

This is an open-ended question and has no simple answer. It depends on your contract, the urgency of the message and whether the message needs lots of explaining and detail.

Most operators bundle minutes and messages into their tariffs to encourage us to imagine that using the phone is free. These calls and messages can be considered to be the same price.

Once we have used this bundled time and text there will be a standard charge (5-25p a minute, 10-12p a message). Often calls will be cheaper but it depends on our pattern of usage. Certainly using SMS as a replacement for IM chat outside your included messages can get very expensive. So can using SMS abroad where a text message is likely to cost 25p.