[asterisk-biz] 8 ports GSM PCI Card or Gateway

[Steve Kennedy]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 06:29:43PM -0500, Steve Totaro wrote:

> Would this work in the US?  I want to use it primarily to send SMS.  It 
> seems that all of the SMS relay companies charge too much.  It would be 
> great to stick my T-Mobile SIM into something like this, route through 
> asterisk to Kanal.  Unlimited SMS is $14.99/mo with T-Mob.
> Anyone know what could accomplish this?

You can get a Siemens TC/MC35 GSM terminal and they'll do SMS quite well
(only one SIM per unit), Nokia make one as do Falcom and others.

I think Junghams make a 4 port card.

You'll be limited by throughput on the units though as they can only
handle a certain number of SMS per minute (probably 10 to 20). You also
have to beware that SIMs have a limited numbers of writes and will stop
working after a while (some terminals allow "sim buffering off" which
will hopefully use the terminal's memory to store SMSs).

Utilising a gateway (like Kannel - note spelling) and a SMPP or equiv
protocol may give you higher rates, but there'll be a per SMS charge.
The phone networks I believe use AA19 agreements for SMS termination
(well in the GSM world) and that's a set termination rate between
operators - somewhere between 2 and 3.5p (4 and 7cents), but diffificult
to find out, unless you're an operator.



Steve

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