SMS-to-Internet Gateways?

starrynights asks: "I am planning to make an on-campus communication system and i need to find a free SMS Gateway. Can anyone give me any information on this?" Interesting thought. It might make an even better do-it-yourself type project. What would you need, aside from a computer with an internet connection, to build something like this on your own?

Not any more?

[Stillman]

Is mtnsms.com not free any more?
Sorry, I don't really do the mad SMS thing, but I thought it was still free for limited messages.

Failing that, google is your friend as usual with a lot of these q's. :P

Re:What The?

[MattBurke]

What's so stupid?

If the poster had asked for an email-to-sms gateway then yes, it would be stupid. But look at the title. "SMS to Internet".

You do a search and you get kannel. OK, so you've got a box and installed kannel on it. Now what do you do? You pay a lot of money to someone for something you can use to make it work, whatever that is... But that's not the question. The poster asked for "free".

It's something I've been looking (admittedly not bery hard) for years, but not found anything which would let me send an email or whatnot from an SMS.

Re:What The?

[ksph2]

I don't know what network you're on / country you're in, but I've been using O2's mmail (www.o2.co.uk) for ages. It'll work both ways, and although it looks expensive it turns out to cost nothing at all if you're on a pre-pay with free texting like I am (i used genie when it existed, so I dont know if you can still get the package I'm on).

Every email I get is copied to my phone, and I can easily send emails from sms (you just stick the email address at the start of a text, which is usally what the 'send text as email' option on your phone will do).

Re:What The?

[ccady]

The poster may or get a brilliant reply which could not have been found on Google. There may be some "orthogonal" information that the poster did not know. Slashdotters have been known to have some insights every now and then.

Slashdot readers get to see what types of questions other readers have. I never looked at SMS to Internet gateways, nor heard of mtnsms.com. Now I know something new that is interesting to me.

Easy peasy

[Ratso Baggins]

Take the one from the top [google.com]

ICQ or DIY

[jquirke]

You could use the ICQ SMS bridge (people have written code to use these - they support most GSM networks).

Alternatively, depending on your SMS costs, you could build one yourself. You can use almost any phone and connect it to a PC with the appropriate cable, or use IrDA with the more expensive phones. Most of the phones that support IrDA can be controlled using simple AT-style commands over virtual serial console, in addition to the proprietary interfaces specific to each manufacturer. There is a great deal of multi-platform software/libraries available - do a search of "SMS" on Freshmeat. Alternatively, you could write your own software.

The AT-style commands can be found in section 07.07 of the GSM specifications.

--jquirke

Re:ICQ or DIY

[Gordonjcp]

What I did a while ago was I got an old Nokia 8110 phone, which I had a serial cable for. Now Gnokii doesn't support its wierd-ass proprietary data format for using it as a modem, but sms's quite happily through it. Then I went to one of the many little corner shops that sell pay-as-you-go sim cards, and stuck one of those in with about £20 credit. If you use Orange (at least in the UK) and you put £50 into a prepaid phone, you get cheaper sms and calls. At about 5p per message, the £20 lasts for quite a while.

Of course, this was more for sending status messages, so it wasn't sending that often. It was handy being able to sms a password and command to the pc, though.

Kannel?

[valkadesh]

You may try Kannel [kannel.org]. Its is a free open source WAP and SMS gateway.

No such thing as free SMS

[ikekrull]

The phone companies have found that, despite SMS using no actual bandwidth on their networks, that it is a popular service, and is hence worth a lot of money.

Might as well forget 'free', the days of free SMS via MTN etc. are pretty much over.

Here in New Zealand, we pay 10-20c per SMS message, typically 20c per message unless you have some volume deal with a telco.

I use a Siemens M20 modem to handle sending and receiving SMS messages as part of my system monitoring, and it is not very expensive, due to the low volume. I use the excellent SMS-Tools package (a search on freshmeat will find this) and the system invokes a perl script upon sending or receipt of an SMS, making it extremely easy to do just about anything I want - i.e. SMS-to-email/web gateway is trivial.

Open it up to the 'public' though, and costs would start to climb hugely. A volume of 1000 messages per day would cost me from $3000-$6000 a month here, which, for the actual bandwidth supplied is rather extortionate.

Not sure what you want to do here..

[Delta]

Hi,

I've been working with SMS solutions for some time now, and might be able to offer some help.

I'm not entirely sure what you want to do here, but I don't think you're likely to find anyone offering free lunches.

If you're looking for something that's *only* sms->internet, not the other way around, you *might* be able to find a gateway offering free service. You will however probably end up paying for the MT (Mobile Terminated) SMS messages.

If you want two way communications your best bet is probably to look at getting sponsored by a SMS Service Provider, or a local teleco. Keep in mind that you can look at most of the providers worldwide for your services, you don't have to limit yourself to the providers of your own country.

There's also the question of how you want things set up. There seems to be two types of serice providers offering 2-way SMS. Some are providing a simple interface in which you use various dataformats (XML is popular) over HTTP to deliver a outgoing SMS message, and their server will connect to yours to deliver an incomming one. The other option is to use a native SMS delivery protocol, such as SMPP. That'll either require custom development, or you can use kannel.

I know of one SMS gateway of the first type who allows you to register keywords on their SMS number, on which you can recieve messages for free. Outgoing still costs though.

Let me know if I can offer any advice on the issue, I'm available at terje(at)elde.org.

[OT] Google

[Delta]

As always, there are several posts which seems to think the author of the post is unable to use google, and seems to imply that the author doesn't have the skills or intelligence to use google because he's posting here.

To be honest I find it sad that these people are posting seemingly without taking the time to understand the question, much less find out if google really offers the answers.

For this spesific question, I read it as the author needing access to a gateway allowing him to send/recieve SMS messages, not that he's looking for the software.

And quite simply, Google does not offer a simple solution for a production grade free gateway which will solve the problems he needs to solve.

At least to me that makes the question not only relevant for posting here, but it's also a interesting question which I'm sure sparks the interest of other /. readers.

Just my $0.02

SMS to Email Gateway

[krishnaD]

First SMS will not be free. If you are looking for reading and writing SMSes using a PC and Cell phone use http://www.gnokii.org.

Using this you can easily have a SMS Email Gateway or sms to internet gateway. You will be able to send/receive emails over SMS using this, though you have to write small scripts (If you want I can send mine). We had done a small project of controlling Electrical Devices using SMS.

You send SMS like "Lights on" to a cell phone which is connected to PC using Data Cable. Poll this Cell phone using Gnokii which will let you read the content of the SMS. Depending on the command you can take the action. For controlling Electrical Device we created a circuit (Search google for Coffee Cup) which was controled by PC parallel port. So when you receive a SMS saying "Lights On" you write one character to (numeric zero will send zero volt) parallel port which will generate 5 Volt current and in turn switch on lights.

SMS Gateway Software

[bisscuitt]

There are Ways to do this... I know a couple of sites on the web that will do it, but i doubt that they are Free (such as MTNSMS)

The probable cheapest way to do this is with a Linux BOX, a GSM Modem, and some SMS gateway software (such as: kannel [kannel.org]).

Using this method, you could provide each user with a number of there own, and all messages sent to that number use your GSM Modem number as thier SMS Gateway. The messages can then be delivered straight into a mailbox, or an SQL DB for a Web App etc....