[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] SMS Carrier gateways for MVNO's

[Boyer, Jason A]

What we've done in the past (since it's only come up once or twice, this doesn't exactly scale...) is manually send emails to the various gateways with just the name of the carrier as the contents. Then they can tell what to choose. 

I had initially thought it would be cool to set up a "real" SMS gateway with a CDMA/GSM modem and some code, but there are a lot of things that would be cool that I've never gotten around to, so you can guess how that's turned out.

Jason

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Jason Boyer
Indiana State Library
http://library.in.gov/

-----Original Message-----
From: Open-ils-general [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Josh Stompro
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2016 10:31 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] SMS Carrier gateways for MVNO's

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Justin, here is an article that has helped me in the past figure it out, http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2011/12/how-to-get-tracfone-net10-or-straight.html

Unfortunately it isn't quite as simple as looking at the serial number, that only works for some non-smartphone models.

+1 to supporting a commercial SMS option, be it twilio or another company.  Making SMS text messages easier for users to enter would be great.

Josh

-----Original Message--
From: Open-ils-general [mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Justin Hopkins ??
Sent: Monday, February 1, 2016 3:43 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] SMS Carrier gateways for MVNO's

Hi Josh,

We've fielded many help desk tickets from our libraries on this question. We typically explain the issue to them as "unless they know the underlying carrier it won't work for them". I learned something today about the model number of their phone being indicative of the carrier. That's good to know. One thing though, for AT&T- is the the word "potato" or the roasted sweet potato emoji 🍠?

This reminds me of a discussion from a while back about trying to gauge the interest of libraries to employ an honest to goodness SMS solution. Personally I think it's a great idea, and while not free it's also not very expensive. I can't put a dollar amount on the value to the libraries, but based on the nature of our help desk tickets concerning sms notifications and "text call number" opac feature I'd say it has considerable value. At some point I had Blake doing some queries to get at a number of texts send per month and IIRC the cost would be less than $70/mo for the entire Missouri Evergreen consortium at current Twilio rates.

Cheers,
Justin

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 2:11 PM, Josh Stompro <stomproj at exchange.larl.org> wrote:
> Hello, I’m interested in how other sites handle SMS hold notices for 
> customers that use Mobile virtual network operators like Straight 
> Talk, Ting and Tracfone?  They all offer phones that work on different 
> physical carriers, and the gateway seems to be different for each one.
> The default Straight Talk sms carrier entry included in Evergreen is 
> for Verizon, but if the user has a AT&T, T-Mobile or Sprint  based 
> phone the Verizon gateway won’t work.  Do you setup variants for each 
> of the physical carriers?  Do users actually know which physical 
> carrier they are on in your experience if you give them the option to 
> choose?  I’m not looking forward having to explain that for Straight 
> Talk if the model number of your phone ends with a v or an w it is on 
> the Verizon network, and if it ends in potato it is on at&t, etc.
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
> Josh



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Regards,
Justin