[asterisk-users] SMS Capabilities

A J Stiles asterisk_list at earthshod.co.uk
Fri May 16 11:03:55 CDT 2014


On Friday 16 May 2014, Jayson Devor wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> We have an order for SMS messaging. Can you gents and ladies be kind enough
> to
> disclose if SMS is possible using Asterisk? What is a quick way to test a
> `Hello World`
> to my cell. Finally, do all service providers support SMS messaging?
> 
> Kind Regards,
> 
> Jayson.

Certainly with an Asterisk-compatible GSM card such as the OpenVox G400P / 
G400E, and some SIM cards, it is possible to send and receive SMS messages.  
Which one you need to buy is dependent on your motherboard's expansion slots:  
G400P is PCI  (32 bit)  and G400E is PCI-express.  SMS is baked into the GSM 
standard, so every mobile telephone company in the world have to support it.  


You can send a message from the Asterisk CLI with a command such as

cli> gsm send sms <span> <dest> "<message text>" <id>

and therefore, from any programming language that has `backticks` or some 
other way to execute a shell command.


Beware!  You may discover very quickly that "unlimited"  (as in when your 
telco promises "unlimited SMS messages")  does not really mean what you think 
it means  :/

Double beware!  Some telcos charge for the delivery report  (which is required 
by the driver software to know if or not the message was sent successfully);  
and some telcos require you to obtain written permission in advance to use 
their SIM in anything other than an ordinary mobile handset, on pain of 
disconnection.  


You can of course also use this piece of kit to receive SMS messages  (they 
are logged under /var/log/asterisk/sms/ ; and also, an extension is triggered 
in your dialplan when a message comes in, with some channel variables 
populated with the originating number, message content and some other goodies)  
and dial and answer voice calls.


-- 
AJS

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