[asterisk-users] Re: Sending SMS

[Steve Kennedy]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 12:01:58PM +0000, Gordon Henderson wrote:

> You're missing nothing; The telcos have us by the short & curlys. For 
> them, it's money for old rope. They probably (in the UK at least) make 
> many times more money through TXT messages than voice. The "base rate" 
> here is about 12p a message. 12p for 160 bytes, or a single data packet 
> over their network - which would be over £700 per MB. There are now "bolt 
> ons" or additional packages depending on the network you're with - eg. 
> with my contract I get up to 500 "free" TXTs a month. I know some people 
> who send dozens a day here. (Especially young people - I think most 10 
> year olds now have mobile phones!).
> It's scandalous, but no-one challenged it when they first anounced it 
> because we all thought it was fantastic! The best thing they ever did was 
> for the 4 networks (in the UK) to agree to pass TXT messages between each 
> other. That was some 6 or 7 years ago, maybe more, and that's when it 
> really took off big time in the UK.

The networks in the UK are regulated in terms of voice termination
(Ofcom didn't like their high termination rates), so it's between 6p and
8p'ish per minute to get on to a mobile network.

Currently mobile termination isn't regulated and to get a connection is
a commercial agreement.

The networks do have agreements with each other (mainly to stop foreign
operators injecting cheap SMSs into the networks), there's a document
AA19 which is the SMS interconnect agreement - however it's a GSMA thing
and to get it, you need to join the GSMA.

Most operators in the UK will no longer allow direct connection to their
SMSC (unless you're expecting to generate very high millions of messages
per whatever period) so you have to go through an aggregator. They tend
to have agreements with multiple operators and will have agreeed a
commercial rate with them (somewhere between 2.5p and 3p per message).
They then will mark their rate up and offer that rate to customers.

Ofcom have stated they are going to look at SMS termination rates and
the operators are resisting.

In the UK retail rates for both SMS and voice may well be below
wholesale rates!!!! Which is a reason people use GSM gateways, which are
still illegal for 3rd party use (i.e. an organisation can use a GSM
gateway for their own traffic, but not carry anybody else's) - which
means telcos cant use them.


Steve


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