US Carriers Requiring Shortcodes - Developer Hostility Hits a New High
The SMTP gateways provided by US carriers kinda suck. Sure, at least we have something, European carriers don’t even have SMTP available. But that’s no excuse for the sucking. I need to deliver messages to myself from production servers, I’m currently doing operations and need to get the notifications as the events happen. I would really like to deliver them to other members of my team. Seems like it should be a simple enough thing.
So even though I’m paying for getting the messages, I decided to swallow my anger and pay an SMS aggregator to deliver me messages. First I started out looking at SimpleWire cause I had used them before. But found that the require a shortcode now:
Simplewire Starter Packages are for non-US and non-Canadian traffic only. All U.S. and Canadian carriers now require a short code to be provisioned for all Simplewire customers.
A shortcode in order to send SMS messages, that’s just stupid I thought. So instead I went to Clickatell, which seemed to have no restrictions of the sort…. except I wasn’t getting some of the messages I sent through Clickatell. I contacted support and got this back:
The US has introduced strict control over messages sent from applications to handsets through the use of short codes. All traffic to US handsets require a valid short code registered with the different networks. Clickatell’s short code has been blocked by T-Mobile due to more than one service(different content from multiple users) sent over one short code which is not allowed and we can not say when other providers could take the same action.
I’m just blown away here. Seriously, this is insane. Just when the mobile environment seems like it can’t get any more hostile toward developers the carriers go and do something like this. People always ask me why we don’t get more carriers involved in the Mobile Monday events, this is demonstration of their mentality. They do not care about you developers and application providers. I don’t know why it’s hard to believe when there are fantastic examples of their hostility like this.
Now I have to map out a route from my house to the office that has 100% wifi coverage. Fuckers.
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November 23rd, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Wow.
-Russ
November 23rd, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Mike,
Not sure what you mean about European carriers not providing SMTP - all of them in the UK provide it to send e-mail from your phone and none of the carriers I’ve used block access to 3rd party SMTP servers either. The carrier’s servers aren’t always the most reliable, but they are there!
Do you mean e-mail to SMS conversion instead? i.e. sending an e-mail to @carrier.com sends an SMS to that number.
Ben
November 23rd, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Go to your happy place, Mike. :) This too shall pass.
November 23rd, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Ben, yes, that’s what I’m talking about. The email to SMS gateways seem to be less popular in Europe than they are in the US.
November 23rd, 2006 at 4:10 pm
I think the reason for the lack of e-mail to SMS gateways in Europe (or one reason anyway) has been the history of SMS interoperability here. In the US, until very recently, the only way to GET an SMS to someone was to email it. Carriers simply didn’t promote peer-to-peer SMS because it largely did not function across networks. European carriers also wanted to protect their SMS revenue, of course, and you can’t charge the sender (calling-party-pays) when they are sending an e-mail from the open Internet.
My analysis: the move you’ve described by US carriers will just drive more developers to adopt alternative messaging technologies (such as mobile IM), and at the end of the day the losers will really be the carriers. But hey, what do I know?
November 24th, 2006 at 7:04 am
Don’t forget, you also have to pay $500/month for a shortcode “lease” or $1,000/month for a “vanity” shortcode.
November 24th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Dan, I really hope you’re right, and I’ll do whatever I can to make it happen. However, I want to get reliable notifications to my handset today, and this is forcing me to look outside of mobile to service my needs. There’s simply nothing available today for a realistic cost and effort that gets me what I need. I imagine the same will be true for others, folks will start wandering away, and everyone will use this as further proof that mobile isn’t a workable environment yet.
November 24th, 2006 at 11:08 am
There was a lot of email to sms gateway in the early days of sms (98-99) until operators realize how big this market was. SMS were not free, but of course email was free. So then operators stopped these email to sms gateway….
But in europe, it’s only the sender who pay, not the receiver. Note sure, but in the us, you pay when you receive alerts, right?
November 24th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Thomas, yes, you pay both ways in the US, The sender pays, and receiver pays. There are email to SMS gateways in the US still, they’re just very unreliable, relatively slow, tend to repeat and/or drop messages, and relatively easy to get blacklisted by. They’re great for a quick hack, but really not a great platform to work on top of.
November 24th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
this thing is bullshit…
to Dan, who wrote “This too shall pass.” yes, sure, the problem is this is new; it wasn’t that way… and now having to wait 2+ years for this to settle is no good…
ceo
November 24th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Mike R on “US Carriers Developer Hostility Hits a New High”…
Mike Rowehl writes about something that has me perplexed, upset, and furious - see All traffic to US handsets require a valid short code registered with the different networks.
This is a very big deal. And is no good… Closed systems, over-contr….
November 26th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
I feel for you.
Take a look at 4INFO’s ‘open platform’ - http://open.4info.net/.
Don’t know if there’s any permissioning; i.e. anyone might be able to sign for your alerts if they know how. You may not care.
November 27th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
[...] Since it looks like carriers in the US aren’t really interested in people building SMS applications, I’ve been trying to figure out alternative ways to get messages to my handset. I registered Agile Messenger and played around with that. It used to be free, but now it’s a subscription product. Well worth it for Symbian devices, it’s a great messenger client. However it’s not quite working for what I want to do. I would like to deliver my messages over Jabber (Google Talk), cause I’ve done too much development in the past against Yahoo and AIM only to have the protocol change underneath me and get stranded. So I want to build on top of a public open standard. However my handset does tend to get lost, as in it looses the connection and doesn’t realize it. [...]
December 1st, 2006 at 3:59 pm
[...] I swapped my mobile phone number (MINE!! thank you number portability) to Cingular yesterday. It took nearly 14 hours for my new handset to start ringing instead of my old one when I call my number, but eventually it did happen. T-Mobile was just pissing me off too much. US carriers are not about customer satisfaction, they’re about how much you can tolerate. I was with T-Mobile because of the wifi that came with my Internet account for a while. But recently I had been seeing more and more issues with their SMTP to SMS gateways, dropped inter-carrier SMS messages, their generally poor coverage, had gotten multiple reports recently from people who say they can’t call my number at all (at all, they get a “number out of service message”, T-Mobile never managed to fix it for at least 3 people), and most recently the discovery that I can’t send messages to my own handset on T-Mobile. [...]
December 10th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
[...] I’ve been seeing more and more mentions of Twitter recently. I joined up a few months ago after the SF Tech Session on mobile communities, but I just put the badge up on my page today after seeing it pop up a few other places. Also at the tech session was TextMarks, who have a widget interface to their SMS keyword service. I like the remixability of the whole thing. I wonder if services like these are going to be able to keep going given the intentions of the carriers to try to determine what the boundaries between one service and another are, but I certainly hope they will. [...]