Re: Sending SMS faster

[Niels Andersen]

On Saturday 16 November 2002 08:05, Leos Tovarek, Ph.D. wrote:
> I am afraid that gnokii is not a tool developed for your kind of
> application with sending thousands SMS in a short time. I believe you
> should rather contact your operator and agree using their SMS gateway.

There's no doubt that that would be the best solution, technically. The 
problem is that here in Denmark the prices are really insane.

To send an SMS with a cellphone costs 0.24 kr. plus the hardware (which is 
quite cheap).

Using a gateway costs 10,000 kr. just to get startet, and then another 4,000 
kr. each month. That would be okay except for the fact, that it costs 
additionally 0.26 to 0.40 kr. for each SMS. That means it can only be a lot 
more expencive, and the only gian is practically that we can send (and 
receive) SMS from a shorter phonenumber.

We need to be able to send our SMSes with cellphones for two reasons. Actually 
both reasons are backup. ;-)
The first backup is so we can be cool while we are negotiating prices for 
access to a gateway. We can say "we don't really need it".
The other backup is in case there's a technical problem with the gateway.

So we know gateway are better, but we still need this.

I've noticed that Gammu only uses 4-5 seconds pr. SMS. This proves that it can 
be done. As far as I can see, the problem must be a bug or something like 
that. I don't know any reason for the 10 second delay.

The problem with Gammu is that it's not possible to set the validity time. 
Some of messages we send will need a validity time of several days, like a 
week or so. Others will only annoy our users if it's arrives just a few hours 
after we send it.

If the problem really is a bug, but nobody wants to fix it, we can probably 
pay for the work, if we can pay the money to someone in Denmark.

-- 
Niels Andersen