Tornevall Networks has a mobile device available, that works quite like other SMS-To-Internet services. Most of the services that interacts between those layers are used to take payments. The most common pay-by-SMS-site is mosms (Site here). It works in this way:
- The service has a prefix, where commands or messages are sent
- The service is bound to a tariff, so the pricing may differ, depending on the developer, etc
- When a SMS arrives to a phonenumber (most common is short numbers like 72550, which actually belong to mosms), the SMS-service is programmed with a receiver (which simply is a http/https-URL to where the messages are handled)
Tornevall Networks once in a time got inspired by this SMS-flow, and created a similar service. The difference here, is that the service is not located on a short number and therefore, it does not cost more than a simple SMS (pricing is set by the mobile operator). The GSM networks is conveniently built by prefixes too and the primary reason for why it was built, is Facebook. Yes. All roads lead to Facebook, right? No, not really, but in this case it all started with a wish to send messages to the private stream on Facebook, via SMS. However, the only operator that supports this is Tre, and I think it's still only Tre that supports this old message-style. But it does not stops here. We also support sending SMS back to the sender. Unfortunately, our gateway still only support sending messages with the length of 160 characters at most. Receiving large messages is however not limited to this size.
Recipt services
One very commonly used method at the GSM Network is the "Recipt service". It means, you will be able to send automated SMS through the gateway, with a small sized code, that identifies a sender from where it came. The gateway can with this message respond back to the "SMS Robot", and confirm that the message really was sent properly. It is a nice way to confirm that important messages really has been sent, for example on incidents. Since the gateway is not a regular "short number service", those recipt will not have a cost of "take a payment"-service, and it's therefore a cheap method to keep track on such messages.