[asterisk-users] Send cell phone #VM waiting, just like cell carrier

[Matt Watson]

On June 22, 2008 11:32:56 am OCG Technical Support wrote:
> Well, I realize that there must be some proprietary protocol between the
> carrier and the phone, since they have a dedicate spot on the cell screen
> for # VM waiting...
>
> As for an SMS message, is there a module/app which allows easy SMS
> messaging?  (I looked a couple of years ago but only found commercial
> modules)

Don't quote me on this, but I think that the standard voicemail notifications 
that cell phones recieve are just a regular SMS message but in some kind of 
special format that the phone recognizes and does not display as a regular 
text message.

I had an unlocked Moto razr at one point that didn't come from my cell 
provider, at one point while I had it the VM notifications didn;t really 
work... everytime i got a VM I'd get a SMS message with special characters in 
the message body.  I sort of chalked it up to not using the branded firmware 
that my provider would have put on my phone if the phone had come from them.

At any rate, if I'm right, and you can find some information on that protocol, 
it might turn out to be alot easier than you think.

and btw - Asterisk ships with app_sms but depending on your country it may not 
really be what you are looking for.  I could be very very wrong here, but I 
don't believe Asterisk has a great implementation for text messaging in North 
America.  This is probably because every cell carrier seems to do it just a 
little bit differently.

Depending on your needs however, most cell carriers offer email-to-SMS 
gateways so you can just send an email to 
<yourcellnumber>@<yourcellcarrier>.com kind of thing... if you need it to 
work from a machine with no Internet access however, then you might need to 
do something like use a dialup modem to dial into your cell carriers TAP 
number (provided they offer one and you can either explain to the tier 1 
support guy what you are looking for, or you can find the number on the 
internet).

However again, I don;t believe Asterisk has any interface for TAP, but in 
theory you could use something like the "sendpage" daemon to handle the TAP 
stuff and then have Asterisk hand off the text messages to sendpage using a 
simple bash script and the System() application... if Asterisk had an 
implementation for SNPP then you could send your messages to sendpage that 
way - also *some* cell providers even offer SNPP gateways over the internet, 
but again good luck explaining to the tech what you want.

I've actually been toying with the idea of creating a res_snpp or something 
for this purpose since I already use sendpage for our server 
monitoring/alerting system to page me on my cell via dialup TAP (so my 
monitoring server can still page me in the event of an internet outage).

Anyhow, sorry that message got a bit lengthy pretty fast!

-- 
Matt Watson
http://www.mattgwatson.ca