Hi Ryan,
It really depends how much traffic you expect to handle. If you expect small traffic (i.e. less than 1 SMS per sec) you can just attach a mobile phone (via serial or USB cable) to the machine running kannel and have your responders send their messages to the mobile phone's number. If you expect more traffic then you should contact a mobile operator and ask them for a connection to their SMSC (Short Message Service Center) or their SMSC Gateway. Usually this is done over the SMPP protocol which is a TCP/IP protocol. However note that unless the operator has some kind of sophisticated SMSC or SMSC Router only mobile subscribers of that company will be able to send their votes, so you will need to make agreements with all major mobile companies to allow everybody to vote. In contrast if you use the phone connection solution any one can send you an SMS to that phone number. If you want to increase your traffic using the phone serial/USB connection solution you can attach more than one phone to your kannel machine and have your voters send a blank SMS to a different phone depending on how many different choices they have. In terms of hardware unless you are looking for a lot of traffic a good PC running linux is more than enough. There are also some other companies that act as SMS Gateways like Clickatell (www.clickatell.com <http://www.clickatell.com/> ) so you could connect to them over internet, but I 've never used them so I don't know any details of how they work. Cheers, Spyros _____ From: Ryan Prior [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2007 3:08 AM To: Azaman Suleiman Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: "Vote-by-SMS a la "Idol" Many thanks to all of you for your responses. I am glad that I found Kannel, and the link to playsms looks very promising as well. I understand that I'll need to use Kannel to connect to the world of SMS, and that Kannel can interface with a program such as playsms in order to build the sort of application that I want. What I still don't understand is what exactly I need on the hardware side. I know that I will need a webserver, but is an internet connection all that I need to send SMS messages? If not, what additional hardware do I need? Do I need to pay a telephone company for service? If so, what services? Those may seem like basic questions, but being new to the world of telephone technology, I don't really understand exactly how the gateways and crossovers work. Again, thanks so much for your help and patience. Sincerely, Ryan On 10/31/07, Azaman Suleiman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Yuppz kannel can do that. You can use playsms together with kannel to do the voting which playsms provided (poll). I have used playsms and tweak abit for some other application which is not a straight simple voting. the link http://playsms.sourceforge.net/ hope that helps. On 10/31/07, Ryan Prior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm involved in the technology planning of a Battle of the Bands event. We > are interested in monetizing the event by letting people vote for their > favourite band via text message and charging a small fee. Is Kannel an > appropriate technology to allow our server to accept text messages and > process them? Has anyone else deployed a similar application? What sort of > hardware do I need to enable such a setup? > I'm a relative newbie in this area and don't really know where to begin from > a technology standpoint, so if anybody has any experience that might be > relevant, please do chip in. :-) > > Thanks much, > Ryan > Student at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire > -- Hj Azaman Hj Suleiman Tel: +6738143127 Fax: +2343188 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
