With the services and information provided by a wireless
carrier, mobile messaging service provider, Unity Connection can use the Short
Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP) protocol to send message notifications in the Short
Message Service (SMS) format to mobile phones and other SMS-compatible devices
when users receive new messages.
Advantages Over SMTP Message Notifications
An advantage of using SMS is that the user device often receives
message notifications much faster than when using SMTP. You can configure Unity
Connection so that each SMS notification message replaces the previous one.
Note that this functionality may not be supported by all mobile service
providers.
SMS Message Length Limitations
The acceptable message length for an SMS message varies
depending on the service provider, the character set used to compose the
message text, and the specific characters used in the message text.
Character sets available include:
-
Default alphabet (GSM 3.38), 7-bit characters
-
IA5/ASCII, 7-bit characters
-
Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1), 8-bit characters
-
Japanese (JIS), multi-byte characters
-
Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5), 8-bit characters
-
Latin/Hebrew (ISO-8859-8), 8-bit characters
-
Unicode (USC-2), 16-bit characters
-
Korean (KS C 5601), multi-byte characters
For 7-bit character sets, a maximum of 160 characters can fit
into an SMS message; for 8-bit character sets, the limit is 140 characters; for
16-bit character sets, the limit is 70 characters; for multi-byte character
sets, the limit is somewhere between 70 and 140 characters, depending on which
characters make up the text of the message. (For multi-byte character sets,
most characters are 16 bits; some of the more common characters are eight
bits.)
Note |
Not all mobile phones support all character sets; most support
the GSM 3.38 default alphabet.
|
Cost Considerations
The cost of setting up SMS(SMPP) message notifications depends
directly on the number of SMS notifications that Unity Connection sends to user
devices. More SMS notification implies higher cost as the service providers
typically charge for each SMS message or group of messages sent.
To cut down cost, you can restrict the use SMS notifications to
a group of users or inform users to limit the number of message notifications
that they receive by message type or urgency. For example, users can specify in
the Messaging Assistant that Unity Connection sends message notifications only
when new urgent voice messages arrive.