Quick, simple, cheap and reliable way to do SMS texting is setup a qpage server with a modem, then you can submit pages directly to the qpage daemon and then qpage dials the cell provider directly. For instance, we configure our qpage server to dial Verizon SMS access number and submit pages directly.
You can download qpage and compile it for use in spectrum either in Windows or Linux. Then call qpage executable in AlarmNotifier scripts. http://www.qpage.org/ Tony From: David Game [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 1:09 PM To: spectrum Subject: RE: [spectrum] Paging Tool? All well and good for you Yanks :) The rest of the world it's not so easy. For example here in the UK you can't SMS straight to phones via email due to the way the billing works. In the US you pay for calls and texts sent AND received due to the way your phone system evolved. However every other country has a "Caller Pays" model and all messages are free to receive (except reverse billing SMS which wouldn't be used by most companies!). This would mean if you could simply email an SMS message, the phone companies would never make any money as most people would email each other responses using the carrier's network and never get charged. The reason we can't do this is that cellphones have their own number structure, for example in the UK it's 07[5-9]xx yyyyyy and Ireland the number is always an "86" exchange ie. 186 1234567. The phone companies recognize this and bill as a cellular call from a regular landline rather than a pstn call. In the US, the FCC decided that cellphones had to be numbered the same as landlines. In NY there was a brief period where the 917 XXX YYYY range was reserved for cellphones, then someone objected, legal stuff happened and the FCC mandated that the any code could carry cellphone traffic. Due to the way the switches worked at the time there was no way on mechanical switches that were still in use to tell which were cellphone calls and which were PSTN calls and no way for your local phone company to bill accordingly. Hence the reason the recipient pays to receive AND call on wireless plans so the cellphone networks can make back some of the money they could have otherwise billed the local telcos and long distance carriers for access charges. Anyway, I digress... In the US billing model at least one party is always getting charged - so if you send an email to a phone via SMS the recipient at least gets charged for receiving (or loses part of his/her text bundle to the value of the SMS message) therefore the phone companies have clawed some cash back. In the rest of the world if someone emailed an SMS, neither party would pay anything for the transport of the message, therefore the phone companies haven't implemented this feature because they can't get money from it. Also the method used in the previous reply for email-SMS doesn't take number portability into consideration, and for sending messages to multiple people you'd need to know which network they were on and script around it. If for example you have 20 support staff all using their own cellphones rather than a corporate plan on one company you'd need to work out per number or subscriber which format address to send to. You used to be able to do this by looking at the number (i.e. 917 586 XXXX would be Verizon so address all texts that match that pattern to [EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) but if 917 586 1271 moved to Cingular then unless you had a database of ported numbers and looked up each number you were texting, the email would be rejected at the other end and the guy on that cellphone wouldn't get the text. So how do we do this then? A cheap way to do it is a PC/Server with a cellular modem in it and a bit of software acting as a gateway. Spectrum could then be scripted to interface with that PC which would then send out the SMS as a regular text message via the cellular card. The gateway would listen on a port for a message and use a predefined protocol for accepting the message, it would extract the number and message text from the datastream and send a text from the cellular card as if someone typed it on a phone keypad. There are 3rd party cellular gateways that do the job too - and some of those you set up an email on your company network for it. Send a mail to the address of the gateway, put the cellphone number in the subject line and the SMS text in the email body. The gateway then receives the email parses the subject line to get the number and sends the body text to the number extracted. I have no idea on prices for these devices though as we've got no need for them here and I've never looked into it! Dave ________________________________ From: Robert Curcio [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 23 October 2008 17:48 To: spectrum Subject: RE: [spectrum] Paging Tool? You don't need a tool, Just use regular SMTP: What's my SMS Email address? AT&T [EMAIL PROTECTED] Example: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cingular [EMAIL PROTECTED] Metrocall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nextel [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sprint PCS [EMAIL PROTECTED] T-Mobile [EMAIL PROTECTED] Verizon [EMAIL PROTECTED] ALLTEL [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________ From: Jon Whitehouse [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2008 11:36 AM To: spectrum Subject: [spectrum] Paging Tool? Is anyone using a tool with Spectrum such as EtherPage to have alerts sent to pagers/cell phone (SMS text)? I'm interested in how complicated doing something like that would be. I know you can do it with eHealth, but I wasn't sure about Spectrum. --- Jon Whitehouse Systems Engineer - IT, Server Support MS 5221 1800 W. 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