Because of billing issues. We do this with the operator NetCom in Norway. The price is set as the originator in the first message, the remaining messages have originator=00.
I made a private patch to Kannel that take care of this, and it really does works fine. However, it may be Netcom changes the originator on their side after sorting out the billing - just a thought.
Interesting!!! Do you mean NetCom will charge for only a single message if all the messages originated from my gateway contains same originator?
-Jeetendra
The actual problem lurking under all this is that bearer-based charging doesn't work very well for concatenated SMS. There isn't a really acceptable solution.
Consider the case where the first message in a Nokia PM (with the magic "charge me" flag set in the sender address) arrives, but the follow-on packets don't. There you have the worst of both worlds, as the customer will be charged for content they will likely never even see.
One solution I have seen implemented is the following variant of the receipt SMS solution -- where a second charged text message is used to tell the billing system that all parts of the message have been sent.
MS ESME ---------(MO)---------> ; Request for service
<--------(MT)---------- ; Part 1 of content ---------(DLR)--------> ; Part 1 delivered OK?
. . .
<--------(MT)---------- ; Part n of content ---------(DLR)--------> ; Part n delivered OK?
<--------(MT)---------- ; Charged MT, sent if all parts OK.
Add the appropriate error handling, and you have a very complex and slow download server that is guaranteed not to cheat the user.
As a side note: if the receipt needn't be visible to the end user, then a simple mechanism could use the protocol_id value 64 (decimal) for the charged MT. This is the dreaded "PING" SM (a/k/a "Replace Message Class 0") which is neither displayed nor stored on SIM on most handsets.
Another note: the MO request is MANDATORY. Consider a prepaid customer that has fallen below whatever balance the operator considers minimal to use SMS. In that case, the customer will have SMS MO barred, and will not be able to initiate the transaction.
David WHITE ONE GmbH
