Many banks, airlines, etc. offer the possibility to receive text message notifications by entering your mobile number. Some other sites have you enter your mobile number and wireless carrier and send messages to your free per-provider email-to-mobile number. But some people definitely do it without asking for the provider. How is this accomplished? Are there commercial services that provide this functionality?
(if this doesn't belong on SO, feel free to migrate to another SE site)
Edit: I'm primarily concerned with mobile numbers in the US, but interested in answers for other countries as well.
Yep, providers of this service are called SMS gateways, good ones should be able to set you up with an API for bi-directional use
There are a few different ways this can happen. If you have access to cellular hardware, like Multitech's MTC-H5 cellular modem or their rCell 100 cellular gateway, you're sending SMS just like a cell phone does, so this bypasses the need to know the carrier of the phone number. If the program you're using can't directly access the hardware, you could try to use a program like ours, PageGate, to receiving alerting notifications from that program to interface with the hardware to deliver the SMS.
There are also message aggregators, companies who provide a web API that allows you to send SMS. You submit the phone number with message to their API, they handle the delivery. Examples of these companies would be Infobip and Clickatell or if you're looking for something for medical markets, you could try TigerText, or for emergency management, you could try Active911 or I Am Responding.
Related
I'm starting an app, and am facing a big doubt.
Relevant info on the app:
Users can chat (p2p, or via server)
Users queue before chatting (i.e omegle, chatroulette, wakie, etc)
Basically, these is the client-server operations of the app. I was
searching for ways to implement this, to not reinvent the wheel, and
so i found Pusher and Quickblox.
Pusher: This is where i have doubts. I need one server to send events to clients, another server to listen to client events via webhook, and yet another server to handle authentication. Though i suppose everything can be on the same server, havent tried this.
Quickblox: to use for chatting, looks good enough, no doubts here for now.
Minus chatting, the only network operation is the queueing, which should be very simple, thus i am left wondering if this is the proper course.
Since these decisions have a major impact on the project (i shiver at the thought of having to rollback), I thought i would ask for some opinions here.
This is my opinion about pusher since I only know pusher.
I'm in the midst of writing my app using pusher now for 1 to 1 chat. (And you can have everything on the same server. )
Implementation is easy, including client events, authentication etc and we do not need to bother about maintaining the infrastructure.
The problem I've encountered over the course of my project is cost. For just sending of messages between 2 person, every time you send a message you are using up 2 message credits minimum(one to the channel, one to subscriber). This is fine, but if you want to create feature like read status, delivery status, and 'user is typing' status, the number of messages adds up very quickly if you have to use 2 message credit for every of such simple client event.
Hence if you have cost consideration like I do, what I did was to use pusher for more critical feature like sending messages in a 1-1 chat and checking whether user are online. On the other side I am planning to use Slanger or other similar pusher self hosted solutions to implement other features like delivery status, read status, and 'user typing' status which I feel are good to have but not as mission critical as sending/receiving the messages itself.
I've read a lot on pusher.com and their pricing is quite reasonable comparing to building and managing the architecture myself, and their service is reliable so far. So it depends on how mission critical is your app.
I have a benchmarking situation that requires some advise.
This is basically a scenario.
I typically use Jmeter to benchmark web page loads.
However in this case, I intend to benchmark an URL that will make some API calls. Basically I'm interested to see the response time of each API call.
The tricky part is that one of the API calls requires a mobile data connection (3G/4G) because the connection will be redirected to carriers to identify which carrier the mobile phone number belongs to. If every carrier does not recognize the mobile phone number, the API call will fail.
I did a manual benchmark(with Jmeter) by connecting my machine to a tethered mobile phone. This worked, however, I find it impractical to have a machine to wirelessly connect to a mobile phone just to run benchmarks. I cannot imagine putting a mobile phone (for every carrier) in a server room.
Does anyone have any idea or any experience in benchmarking an API that requires 3g/4g connection? Are there any tools out there?
I tried googling around, but, did not come out with anything useful.
Any advise is appreciated.
I've got an application that sits behind a US based SMS Short Code. I can test my application from the point of ingress into our systems to the point of egress and am confident about the functionality within those boundaries.
What I want to be able to do is extend the test to include the SMS Aggregator that is handling our short code. I want a service provider that will allow me to send and SMS via an API to a short code. We're working with 2 different SMS aggregators (a Tier1 and a Tier3) and both api's only allow SMS messages to be sent to long codes (10 digit numbers). I've also tried Tiwlio's SMS API, but they also do not allow SMS messages to be sent to a short code.
Can anyone recommend a service, hardware device, or other solution that would allow us to message a short code so that we can automate testing and monitoring of our short code based applications?
Thanks,
Kyle
This is probably disallowed by the aggregators due to difficulty in determining what short codes incur premium charges for MT messages.
Given that you can send to a shortcode from any GSM modem/handset with a valid SIM, why not interface with one of those and use the AT command set to send your test messages?
I am just brainstorming here. Let's say I have 2 mobile devices, iPhone, Android, WinPhone7, BlackBerry, Palm, whatever. I'd like to communicate my location (latitude/longitude) from my device to another one. What is the best way of doing this?
The assumption that each device has either built-in mapping capabilities or a custom-built native app.
I've thrown around ideas like SMS/MMS or email with links embedded in them. However, they all seem to be cludgy.
Any other ideas?
A web service (or, if you must and don't care about security, Twitter) that each phone could poll for changes to location might work out. The web service would have to accept the coordinates, obviously, plus be able to be polled for updates by each device. Security is obviously a concern, but that might be another way to go provided that each device had a custom app to accomplish this task as well as web access to poll for changes.
I would go for SMS. It is guaranteed to be private, reliable, low-cost and easy on battery.
Web service is also an option, however:
privacy is a concern, as the data will leave mobile operator internal network
reliability - well, you would have to build your own messaging system and that can always fail
end-user cost - in order to access web service, end-user would have to activate a data session and constant polling can be a source of significant traffic.
development cost - you would need to develop that web service
battery life - constant polling over the data connection will have an effect on the battery.
Compare that with SMS:
privacy - SMS never leaves operator network, so it is guaranteed to be as private as your phone calls are.
reliability - SMS center is guaranteed to always be there by your mobile operator to accept your messages
end-user cost - in most networks, SMS cost is negligible
development cost - well, as SMS center is already there, you can use it without any additional effort from your side (excluding your soft that needs to send and receive those SMSs)
battery life - no adverse effect on battery
In any case, both devices still have to have a "mapping app" that you can program to interface with the SMS/web-service data.
I am currently developing a web service that is configured to receive SMS text messages from different cell phones. Along with each message I also get the mobile number from which the SMS originated.
My question is it possible for someone to masquerade as a different phone number. That is it possible to send a SMS from phone (or other means) and make it look as if it came from a particular number?
I have read of SMS spoofing where it is possible to receive SMS intended for other numbers but I want to know if it is possible to send posing as someone else (send from phone or a web app etc).
Spoofing is pretty trivial with the right setup. For example, we send large numbers of SMS using a 3rd-party aggregator service, and each SMS has an "originator" field, which can be a phone number (specifically, a MSISDN), or a text value. We could, if we wanted, put anyone's number in there.
SMS is extremely insecure. It was designed as a back-channel for GSM engineers to test their networks, and turned out to be a nice revenue spinner, so they just left it as it is.
That's not to say you shouldn't send sensitive information over SMS, just be aware of the insecurity, and trust (or don't trust) messages accordingly. No channel is 100% secure, you need to decide if it's secure enough for what you want to send over it.
As I can send via GMX Webinterface - with my Phone number as Sender, I conclude that it is indeed possible.