Progress on the GSM network at FreeCalypso HQ

Denver Gingerich denver at ossguy.com
Tue May 10 22:39:51 UTC 2022


On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 10:35:36PM +0000, Denver Gingerich wrote:
> I'm not aware of any particular gotchas with the BulkVS SMS service, though I have not used their SMS service myself.  It is perhaps more expensive than other providers (as an example, many bulk providers do not charge for incoming SMS), but otherwise seems fine on the surface.
> 
> My comment about "if you care about texting features" referred more to some extras on top of SMS that I recall you were not a fan of from your previous posts here (more on that below).  If one is concerned about group texting, for example, then BulkVS probably won't suffice.
> 
> Having tested a lot of different VoIP providers claiming to support SMS, I would just caution anyone using a new service to test for the full set of ASCII characters and ideally some non-ASCII UTF-8 if you care about such things, since many providers will silently ignore and/or convert to spaces any characters that aren't in the GSM 7-bit default alphabet (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38 ) rather than upgrading to UCS-2.  Perhaps also test deliverability over time.  And be especially careful about whether the provider supports P2P routes or only A2P - it is hard to find the former, and very expensive to use the former (not to mention likely inappropriate if you're not a business sending transactional messages).

Sorry, that last sentence should say "very expensive to use the _latter_" (i.e. A2P).  This expense is due to the cost of registering each number/"campaign" with TCR (The Campaign Registry), now a requirement for all non-P2P numbers.

Denver
https://jmp.chat/


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