i notice with interest that there are many sites/scripts that enable sms to be sent through websites. what are the commercial issues regarding this? who pays for the sms to be sent? it seems from the threads i read in this forum that it's free or both the user and the webmaster - definitely too good to be true. also, how countries do the common scripts normally cover?
Recently my brother received a bunch of "spam SMS" that notified him on new free ringtones at such and such site. The catch was that if he read the SMS, he would be charged $2 or more. This ended up happening at least 3 times a day and took a lot of effort to get a refund (totalling $120!). The interesting part is that he mentioned that he used a free SMS site before he started receiving the messages.
1) Email-to-sms gateways provided by individual network operators - not intended for commercial applications due to many issues that surround it. 2) Aggregator option 1 - sender pays. 3) Aggregator option 2 - recipient pays (i.e. reverse billing).
Most likely, they are being sent through the Mobile Network Operator's (MNO's) email-to-sms gateway, in which case no-one is paying because the MNO is sending it to itself and does not have to pay any other networks their respective termination fee. You'll usually find that common scripts require the MNO of the recipient mobile (because they'll need to send it to the right email address) and those which don't usually have compiled a list of numbering plans through which they link numbers to networks through their prefixes. However, with both of these, there are many issues (as mentioned in the first post) that prevent this option from being adopted on a commercial level. These include, for example: 1. Mobile number portability. This is when a number was originally located on network X (and therefore has a number with the respective prefix) but was then moved over to network Y and retained the same number. 2. Inability to set the source address of the message (i.e. who it was from) which also prevents two-way messaging. 3. MNO's not happy about their free service aimed at individuals being abused and therefore limiting the number of messages being sent. 4. etc. I wish i had more time to give you more info.