Short Message Peer-to-Peer or the SMPP Gateway is basically a telecommunication’s protocol that makes the transfer of SMS or Short Message Service a possibility between hosts. The gateway is not used for the delivery of messages directly to the destination cell phones but it is predominantly used between bulk SMS aggregators and third-party businesses or entities for sending and receiving short text messages.
An Overview of SMPP SMS Gateway
As you might have already found on the internet, SMPP originally came into being by the efforts of a company from Ireland. The company was called Aldiscon. Since its very inception, there have been several versions of this protocol available in the market. v5.0 is the latest version of the SMPP SMS Gateway but v3.3 is one version that is still being used by many users. It is probably the most commonly used SMPP versions. One of the most basic differences between SMPP v5.0 and SMPP v3.3 is that the v3.3 version requires a completely separate socket connection for both sending and receiving data. There are some bulk messaging service providers that offer versions of v3.3 with the availability of the transceiver field. This means that one single socket connection is required for both sending and receiving text messages.
How Does an SMPP SMS Gateway Work?
An SMPP SMS gateway works on the transport level or level 4 of the OSI model. This specifically means that it can use either X.25 SVC3 or TCP for exchanging binary responses and requests PDUs or Protocol Data Units with their respective hosts. Coming to data exchange, SMPP might be synchronous or it might even be asynchronous. Here, it is important to note that with synchronous messages each peer should wait for the response on the PDU that is sent. On the other hand, with asynchronous messaging, the responses for the PDUs being sent are again sent back to the sending peers in batches. This means that peers do not need to wait for PDU responses.
The SMPP SMS gateway works by simply connecting the SMPP server to the client database. Here, it is important to note that the client offers the destination cell phone number, alternative labeling and message content for the purpose of tracking. Once all these procedures are completed, the gateway software transforms data into short message layout bad delivers it to the cell phone numbers provided.
Eligible Users for the SMPP Gateway
Because of the permanent connections between the businesses or organizations and the bulk SMS service providers, SMPP connections tend to be highly expensive and therefore they cannot be maintained by budget-conscious users. Therefore, the bulk messaging service providers who are also called aggregators put down a limit or restriction on the number of messages that can be sent through an SMPP gateway on a monthly basis. It is only because of this reason that SMPP is considered suitable for large businesses that require high volumes of messages to be delivered in the most time-critical, fast and reliable manner.
Conclusion
When trying to using SMPP server, it is very important to make the choice of a provider carefully. This is because latency has an important role to play in a client-server arrangement and most importantly in accomplishing higher throughput. Therefore, it is important for you to check the latency between the provider and the SMS gateway provider prior to making the ultimate choice.
