Table of Contents


 

  1. Executive Summary
    1. Enterprise Grade SMS API
  2. Solution Description
  3. Solution Benefits
  4. Technical Specifications
    1. Features 
    2. Application Programming Interfaces 
    3. Push and Pull Modes 
    4. Security
    5. Two Way Messaging 
    6. Message Types 
    7. Multipart Messaging
  5. More Information
    1. Web Sites

 

 

Executive Summary

Enterprise Grade SMS API

Bulletin SMPP provides your company with a simple and powerful way to communicate with mobile devices. A few lines of code are all that is needed to send and receive SMS messages through networks all over the world. Bulletin specialises in direct carrier connectivity to ensure the widest range of features are available to our clients.

 

Our patented temporary addressing technology enables real two-way messaging. Replies are correlated with outgoing messages, enabling sophisticated SMS applications like dispatch systems, auctions, ordering, and chat. We support a wide range of message features, including multipart messages, business cards, calendaring, and internet push.

 

Getting started is quick and easy. You can use your credit card to sign up online and begin sending messages immediately. If you're sending a lot of messages we offer volume discounts, and if you're in need of a billing solution, you can use ours.

 

Bulletin SMPP; we take care of the details so that you can get on with business.

 

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Solution Description

Bulletin SMPP connects your applications to the global mobile network so we are able to provide a single point of contact for sending SMS messages to any mobile phone, worldwide.

 

With a range of business interfaces, Bulletin SMPP ensures that integrating SMS into your applications or solutions is easy. The most popular interfaces include a SOAP based Web Service and an extremely simple, powerful and adaptive HTTP API interface.

 

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Solution Benefits

Benefits:

  • Any SMS solution easily and quickly.
  • Great marketing opportunities. Send info to your mobile customer.
  • Gain revenue from messages your customers send to you.
  • Attract the public to your business through TEXT promotion.
  • Access to mobile phones all over the world.

Features: 

  • Send and receive messages (two way).
  • Connect at one point to mobile phones and pagers all over the world.
  • Mobile originate message applications (short codes).
  • Industry standard business interfaces.
  • Monitor your SMS solution to ensure reliability.
  • Full automated end to end testing.
  • Premium rate messages.

 

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Technical Specifications

Features 

  • Global Access 
    We are a global network access provider. We connect directly to the networks to ensure that a wide range of features can be offered, and dedicate a lot of time to ensuring that our connectivity is optimized. 
  • Short Code Support 
    Bulletin SMPP includes full support for short codes (network specific custom numbers). We take the hassle out of setting up by working with the network providers for you. 
  • Integrated Billing 
    We can handle customer billing for you, saving money and allowing you to get to market quickly. 
  • Reply Tracking 
    We specialize in two-way messaging. We use our patented mTAG technology to transparently return replies to your messages. 
  • Smart Messaging Support 
    With support for multipart messages, business cards, calendaring, and more, Bulletin SMPP allows you to deliver a wide range of rich content, simply. 
  • Monitoring 
    We provide message status notification, end to end monitoring, online logging, and load graphs to help keep your application ticking. 
 
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Application Programming Interfaces

Bulletin SMPP offers two programming interfaces: SOAP, for industry standard integration with your development environment and applications, and an HTTP interface to enable simple hand-coded solutions.


HTTP

A lightweight API HTTP provides the simplicity that you're looking for. Sending a message is as easy as POSTing a web form, and receiving is as easy as getting a web page.

 

SOAP

An industry standard, SOAP is supported in all modern development environments. Use SOAP to address the Bulletin SMPP interface in an object oriented and strongly typed manner, reducing development time and errors.


SMPP

The short message peer-to-peer protocol (SMPP) is a telecommunications industry protocol for exchanging SMS messages between Telcos's (carriers). It also allows third parties (e.g. Bulletin.net) to submit messages allowing us to provide carrier grade connectivity to you. 

If you use a legacy SMPP system and would like to remove your reliance on one carrier and reduce your overheads then contact us and ask about our SMPP Connector.

 

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Push and Pull Modes

We can deliver messages to your application in real time (push messaging), or you can poll Bulletin SMPP to retrieve messages in batches (pull messaging).


Polling is easy to set up and to secure, and avoids problems with firewalls. Push messaging is more appropriate when low latency is critical.


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Security

Both the SOAP and HTTP interfaces offer SSL security. Your application must support SSL to secure messages sent to it in push mode.

 

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Two Way Messaging

Our patented mTAG technology enables real two-way messaging.

 

When someone replies to an SMS message, the mobile device does not tell the network which message the user is replying to. This restricts SMS applications to a flat request/ reply flow, and requires that each application you run have a unique address. By associating a temporary reply address with each outgoing message we overcome these limitations.

 

The Problem

Consider an internet messaging application like Windows Live Messenger or Skype. Sending SMS messages from these applications is easy, but they can't accept replies to SMS messages because it is impossible to tell who to forward the incoming messages to:

  1. Bob uses the chat application to send Alice a message. 
  2. Carol uses the chat application to send Alice a message. 
  3. The chat application forwards the messages to Alice. 
  4. Alice replies to the message from Bob. 
  5. Who is the message for? 

You'll encounter the same problem yourself if you text two questions to a friend. They might send back two replies, or one, and they might send replies in any order:

 

Q:


What's your favourite color? 

 


How are you feeling?


A:


blue

 

It is impossible to correlate incoming messages with outgoing messages because the protocols used to send SMS messages don't retain any information about how the messages are related to each other; hitting the "reply" button on your mobile phone doesn't tag the message you send as being a reply to the message you're viewing, it just fills out the destination number for you.

 

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The Solution

Bulletin SMPP maintains a large pool of numbers to send messages from. Every time we send a message we pick a new address from our pool and store it, along with the message and destination number, in our database. When the message arrives at its destination the "from" address that appears on the phone is the number we picked from our pool. When the user hits "reply" the "from" address is used as the destination. Then, when the Bulletin Connect receives the reply, we can correlate it with the outgoing message by looking in our database for the message with a matching pool and destination number.

 

To make reply tracking easy for client applications we allow them to pass an ID with each outgoing message. The correlated ID is then returned to the client with each reply.

 

The diagram below shows the processing path of a message from creation to reply:

mTAG Message Processing 

 

  1. A client sends a message to phone number "+123456" using a chat application. The chat application assigns the message an ID and passes it to Bulletin SMPP.
  2. Bulletin SMPP assigns the message a temporary reply address from its pool of numbers. The number is stored in the database along with the destination address, the client's name, and the ID that the chat application assigned. Bulletin SMPP then passes the message to the SMSC.
  3. The SMSC stores the message and forwards it to the destination phone.
  4. The recipient replies to the message. Hitting the "reply" button automatically addresses the reply to the sender (in this case using the temporary reply address assigned by Bulletin SMPP). The handset passes the message to the SMSC.
  5. The SMSC forwards the reply to Bulletin SMPP. It also passes the source (handset number) and destination (temporary reply address) of the message.
  6. Bulletin SMPP queries the database to find the most recent message with a matching handset and pool number. It retrieves the associated client name and client ID from the database and transmits the reply, along with the ID, back to the chat application.

 


Examples

True two-way messaging enables a class of SMS applications that could not be built before: chat applications (as above); dispatch applications, where drivers pick jobs from lists sent to them; auction applications, where bidders reply to notifications when they're out-bid; and email to SMS bridges, to name a few.


Patents

Bulletin holds patents in the United States and New Zealand that cover this technique (US Patent #6134432 and NZ Patent #330703).

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Message Types

SMS

With over 550 Billion messages sent in 2004, SMS is the workhorse of the mobile world.


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Multipart Messaging

Some networks (notably GSM networks) support multipart SMS, allowing more than 160 characters to be sent to mobile devices. Where available, Bulletin Connect supports long messages transparently. 

 

vCARD

The vcard format allows you to send contact information directly to a mobile phone's contact list. The standard, which is maintained and documented by the Internet Mail Consortium (http://www.imc.org), is supported by most phones.  
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Spears;Britney
TEL;PREF:+13107528000
EMAIL;INTERNET;1:[email protected]
ADR;INTL;HOME:;Suite 300;132 South Rodeo Drive;Beverly Hills;CA;90212;USA
BDAY:19811202
END:VCARD

  
vCALENDAR

Vcalendar, another IMC format, allows you to send appointments and to-do notes to phones.  
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//xyz Corp//NONSGML PDA Calendar Version 1.0//EN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20051104T120000Z
UID:[email protected]
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:[email protected]
DTSTART:20060225T043000Z
DTEND:20060225T053000Z
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:CONFERENCE
SUMMARY:Team meeting
DESCRIPTION:Bulletin Wireless Team Meeting
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

  
WAP Push 

As the number of internet ready phones increases, the demand for rich content like music, video, and games is increasing. Use WAP push messages to initiate downloads of 3G content from your application.

 

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More Information

For the latest information about our product and services, please see the following resources:


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Web Sites

http://www.bulletin.net

 

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Reproduction of the whole or part of this document constitutes an infringement of copyright.
Copyright Bulletin.net Inc. 2004-2011

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