We handle SMS, both outgoing from customers, and incoming via various carriers, and we are now linking in once again to SMS with mobile voice SIM cards. The original code for this is getting a tad worn out, so we are working on a new system. It will have ingress gateways for the various ways SMS can arrive at us, core SMS routing, and then output gateways for the ways we can send on SMS. The plan is to convert all SMS to/from standard GSM 03.40 TPDUs. This is a tad technical I know, but it will mean that we have a common format internally. This will not be easy as there are a lot of character set conversion issues, and multiple TPDUs where concatenation of texts is used. The upshot for us is a more consistent and maintainable platform. The benefit for customers is more ways to submit and receive text messages, including using 17094009 to make an ETSI in-band modem text call from suitable equipment (we think gigasets do this). It also means customers will be able to send/receive texts in a raw GSM 03.40 TPDU format, which will be of use to some customers. It also makes it easier for us to add other formats later. There will be some changes to the existing interfaces over time, but we want to keep these to a minimum, obviously.
Work is going well on this, and we hope to switch Mobile Originated texting (i.e. texts from the SIP2SIM) over to the new system this week. If that goes to plan we can move some of the other ingress texting over to the new system one by one.
We'll be updating documentation at the same time.
The new system should be a lot more maintainable. We have a number of open tickets with the mobile carrier and other operators to try and improve the functionality of texting to/from us. These cover things like correct handling of multi-part texts, and correct character set coding.
The plan is ultimately to have full UTF-8 unicode support on all texts, but that could take a while. It seems telcos like to mess with things rather than giving us a clean GSM TPDU for texts. All good fun.
We have updated the web site documentation on this to the new system, but this is not fully in use yet. Hopefully this week we have it all switched over. Right now we have removed some features from documenation (such as delivery reports), but we plan to have these re-instated soon once we have the new system handling them sensibly.
MO texts from SIP2SIM are now using the new system - please let support know of any issues.
Texts from Three are now working to ALL of our 01, 02, and 03 numbers. These are delivered by email, http, or direct to SIP2SIM depending on the configuration on our control pages.
We have switched over one of our incoming SMS gateways to the new system now. So most messages coming from outside will use this. Any issues, please let support know ASAP.
We are currently running all SMS via the new platform - we expect there to be more work still to be done, but it should be operating as per the current documentation now. Please let support know of any issues.
We have switched the DNS to point SMS to the new servers running the new system. Any issues, please let support know.