SMS on Alternate Ports
Following up on some of the mobile applications pondering I was doing the other day, I’ve been pointed at and run across some new info about SMS usage. I figured I would post it to share, seeing as how that post pondering if it can be done is currently the number one search result for “sms alternate port”.
First of all, yes you can send to alternate ports through many of the aggregators, though the feature seems to be used so infrequently that it isn’t included in the standard docs and might be a bit obtuse and hard to use. Comments to my last post pointed me at these:
- Mobivity, a US based mobile marketing company, makes it easy to do
- Sending SMS on other ports with Clickatell is possible, just poorly documented and not very user friendly
That’s all well and good, but SMS is relatively nasty and expensive and very regionally segmented, hard to use for most folks. But then Dan pointed me at the Betavine APIs. Part of what they do is allow sending SMS, for free. Including application trigger SMS messages, which are SMS messages on alternate ports. Interesting, but I was skeptical to say the least. I’ve been working through some issues trying to use them from the US, but I’ve been told that yes, the API should allow you to send a message anywhere. Yep, anywhere in the world.
They even allow you to register a web mashup and give it it’s own id so that you can send SMS from it. The default bucket of messages is only 100 for a user, and I need to dig a bit more into how that gets refilled and if this would be workable for a real service running at volume. But hell, if nothing else it lowers the barrier to entry for mobile developers. If you’re looking to try out some SMS stuff and want to be able to send arbitrary messages anywhere in the world, check out Betavine.
