What you heard is exactly correct. It's the same channel that is used to keep the phone connected to the network irrespective to whether you are making a call or sending text or browsing data. The phone needs to stay connected and there is data that is constantly being sent back and forth with a minimum packet size. SMS text gets sent through that exact same packet so technically it is of no extra cost to the network.
The maintenance cost yes - there probably is some, if it's the responsibility of the network to monitor content of the messages for reasons such as national security. But other than that, which I could see as being expensive, maintenance of the database, should not have been that big of a deal. It would perhaps be more understandable if the providers here included a fair amount of texts per day or per month for free to prevent over usage of texts and under usage of voice and data, where they make more of their money. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jason Miller Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2013 3:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMS ** Exactly! That is why many people are getting "ripped off" for paying $10 a month to send/receive text. The way I also understand it is SMS is on the cellular backbone channel that is in use no matter if you use text or not. Sure there is some maintenance costs/effort for the carrier that comes with providing SMS but probably nothing close to what they are making off the texting plans they sell. It is more or less free money. On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Joe D'Souza <[email protected]> wrote: ** You are right about that the signal required for sending an SMS is bare minimal compared to what is required for voice. From what I was once told when I was working on a Telecom project about 5 years ago, was that the signal required to send a text based SMS message is the ping that is required by the device to 'stay alive' in the network. Its not significantly more than that, which is why many countries bundled SMS as a FREE service, priced in with the cost of voice. This explains why you would still receive an SMS when hiking on hill tops when you have almost less than a bar. MMS messages however take more bandwith, as would data connections for email. Skype does have a API that is available to purchase, but no web services yet to the best of my knowledge. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Shellman, David Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2013 8:03 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMS Joe, I'm not an expert but have been given some insight into of differences between SMS and Email. Some of those conversations were with very knowledgeable folks that support the TelAlert product and some from sales engineers with AT&T. If memory serves me correct, SMS is part of the voice channel. Receiving an SMS requires less signal of a shorter duration that the data connection requires for email. While we think mobile phone technology is everywhere I go to some regions of Virginia where AT&T does not have much of a presence. Getting email and SMS can be a challenge. There are times when hiking ridge tops, we will pick up enough of a signal that we can receive/send an SMS. It's not strong enough to receive/send email. I know this is an extreme example but the same analogy can be made deep in a building or a shielded data center. Email also does not have a routing priority associated with it. You will get the email but it might be in seconds, minutes, or hours. Hours can be extreme these days but it can happen. TelAlert is configurable to use messaging applications like AIM and Yahoo. Not sure about Skype or Gtalk as these are more recent additions to that space. However they are probably looking at how to integrate them. Dave. From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joe D'Souza Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2013 5:27 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMS ** That's a good case for when your system is provisioning services for internal customers - agreed there. I still am in favor of seeking possibilities to integrate to messaging applications like Skype or AIM or Yahoo or GTalk in case they have published integration points like WSDL or their API's. Its just kind of hard to sell some of those ideas to most managements who evaluate their options using dollars and cents - pounds shillings and pence.. :-) Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Shellman, David Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 9:57 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMS Joe, I can be hard to send email to alert your email team that the email server is down. Dave On Jun 4, 2013, at 8:16 PM, "Joe D'Souza" <[email protected]> wrote: ** I just had another thought on this (which was honestly fueled by a discussion I had with a fellow Remedy developer at the WWRUG on a similar related topic about integrating into popular messaging/chat systems.) With almost a good 70 to 80% of us who have phones that are email capable, do you really want to spend whatever it needs to have your system send an SMS message in this day and age? Most phones are perfectly capable of receiving emails from at least 1 email address. So why not just send an email? Chances are 100% of phones in the very near future will be email capable. So it really goes down to whether it's worth spending the time and money it needs to stage a system that is SMS capable, to bridge the gap of those users that do not have email capable phones. The larger that gap, the more sense it might make to invest in that system. Just a thought. Joe _____ From: Joe D'Souza [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 3:46 PM To: ARS Discussion List Subject: RE: SMS True about web services being perhaps a lot cheaper option if available. Great suggestion. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Kallestad Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 3:34 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SMS ** Telalert got *very* expensive and full of unnecessary bells and whistles. (they bundle it with their own help desk software and do voice recognition if I remember correctly, things like that) I still see telalert out there at a few customers, but most people are using SMS to email gateways or blackberry. I think if you contact them they will still sell licenses for the old version that is strictly for paging, but they don't advertise it. There are a number of web services that are open for integration that will confirm delivery, but my experience with testing them out is that they are about as reliable as the email gateways but with the email gateways you can contact the telco about fixing delivery problems (like if your email servers get flagged as a spammer) Integrating with a SIM card device / hosted provider is expensive and takes a long time for approval mainly because it's generally used for advertising and even with all the alerts remedy sends, the volume will fall far short of what those are typically used for. If you want to receive messages as well - it's a choice of either hosting a SIM card or leveraging a web service. Some providers will post the inbound messages to a web service, others convert it to an email, and others will allow you to poll a web service. On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Joe D'Souza <[email protected]> wrote: ** EtherPage <http://www.ppt.com/perl/itgui.pl?handler=home/index> was a tool I used a really long time ago, that can do it. They had changed owners once and I do not recall the entire history but it appears like they are still around. Another tool that I used was TelAlert <http://www.mir3.com/telalert/> . It used to be bundled with Remedy. In my experience I found EtherPage a little more easier to setup and maintain way back then. The dynamics may have changed by now. Joe PS: I am not sure if the hyperlinks I have attached to these products are accurate. Didn't have the time to verify. _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Grooms, Frederick W Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 3:07 PM To: [email protected] Subject: SMS Has anyone done an integration with ARS and sending/receiving SMS text messages? 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