Understanding SMPP and How It Can Mobilise Your Business

According to the South African Advertising Research Foundation (SAARF), 69.8% of all South Africans have access to mobile phones. Only 23.8% have access to a computer. Of the entire population 8.8% rely on contracts to keep the communicative pulse alive, with the remainder finding recourse in the convenience of prepaid solutions. Why is this important?

While just over two-thirds of all South Africans can receive SMS marketing messages, 61% would most probably prefer to respond to those messages by text than spend their prepaid budget on a call. A fair amount of contract owners, too. So how do you, as a corporate entity, reach them? Is there an affordable way to enable your clients, customers and/or employees to get in touch with you using their mobile device? Indeed there is… introducing the SMPP protocol.

SMPP provides a robust and flexible solution for companies that require the sending and/or receiving of a large amount of text messages on a monthly basis. Capable of piggybacking on the OSI model application layer (TCP or X.25 SVC3), it provides you with the opportunity to send large amounts of SMS messages in rapid succession from a mobile device, also known as a Short Message Entity (SME), or non-mobile device, External Short Message Entity (ESME), to the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC). After that the messages are delivered to your employees’ or customers’ cell phones.

Real world examples where SMPP can be used to provide improved service delivery include fleet management, tracking and bulk customer/employee communication where reliable and timely message delivery is of the essence. In fact, SMPP is also employed when transmitting sports scores, time-critical currency information and even weather reports. But why use it, especially when a host of other protocols that can provide almost the same functionality exist?

SMPP is regarded as a de facto standard, and can be employed to send messages, not only to mobile devices, but to other SMSC’s and ultimately, other ESME’s, such as computers. The beauty of SMPP lies in its request/response feature, allowing for safe delivery of the binary encoded SMPP PDU’s (Protocol Data Units). This can either be done synchronously (each PDU sent requires a response before the next can be sent) or asynchronously (multiple PDU’s can be sent at once before acknowledgement is sent back to the transmitting entity). The status of each individual message can also be checked by setting the registered delivery flag.

The two-way functionality of SMPP makes it possible for companies to further communicate with customers, clients and employees in a language of their choice and, depending on the operator, the appropriate characters by means of Unicode text support. “Reply for a chance to win R25000″, whether sent with Latin or Chinese characters, provides a classic example of where SMPP might be employed to receive communication from mobile devices. These messages can then be stored and utilised as desired.

Currently v3.3 is the most widely employed, even though v5 has already been released. One of the key differences between v3.3 and later versions is the fact that a separate virtual connection and SMPP session is required to send and receive data respectively. It is however recommended to refer to the SMPP API documentation as some operators allow the use of the BIND_TRANSCEIVER field, which requires only one virtual connection and one SMPP session

If you want to mobilise your business and you’re looking for a reliable, high volume two-way mobile messaging capability, then look no further than SMPP.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.