[asterisk-users] Emerging dilema? DID forwarding meets SMS

[Gordon Henderson]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Karl Fife wrote:

> We have a number of DID's that do the standard VoIP tricks: ringing
> multiple locations, findme-followme etc.  What is happening more and
> more is that customers call those DID numbers, and draw the reasonable
> conclusion that they are calling mobile numbers because they literally
> can HEAR that the called party is on a mobile.  Consequently many of
> those customers draw the conclusion that they can safely send SMS's to
> those DID numbers.  Naturally the SMS messages disappear into the ether.
> It occurrs to me that relaying SMS messages following dialplan logic may
> become an increasingly common objective.
>
> I say the SMS messages 'naturally' disappear but maybe I'm just ignorant
> to this topic because it has not been important to us in the past.

Er, they don't dissapear for me. I send a TXT to a landline, the phone 
rings and there is a text to speech robot which reads it out to you, or, 
you can register to not have that happen, and then it sends it to a device 
which decodes the tones and puts it on the phone display. (And by a 
similar method you can send TXTs from a landline phone that has the right 
facilities)

If you don't answer, it tries a few more times, or you can call the number 
and it'll speak it back to you.

Don't you have that facility?

Maybe it depends on country and telco.

> Currently we routinely SEND SMS's from Asterisk triggered by other
> dialplan events.  So far we've never needed to RELAY from one DID to
> another.  Are terrestrial carriers even presented with SMS messages? Is
> anyone using Asterisk to relay SMS messages?

The possibilities probably depend on the country you're in..

Gordon