How to connect your SMS Gateway to the mobile network?

To connect your SMS gateway to the mobile network you have various options. You can connect wirelessly the same way as mobile phones connect. You can connect to the SMSC of a mobile network operator over the Internet using the SMPP, UCP or CIMD2 protocol or you can use an on-line http sms service. In either case it is a good practice to use multiple connections to the mobile network for fault tolerance, load balancing, least cost routing and backup routing purposes. A common practice is to setup an IP sms connection (e.g. SMPP client connection) for everyday high performance messaging. After this connection is working, it is a good idea to setup a wireless link as backup. You can setup a wireless link using an SMS modem pool. These to connections will make sure your system operates even if the primary SMS service fails.

How to connect your SMS gateway to the mobile network wirelessly

To connect your SMS gateway to the mobile network wirelessly, you will send sms using a GSM modem, or you will send sms using a GSM modem pool or you will use an Android Mobile phone.

In either case you need SIM cards purchased from a local mobile network operator, and the phone numbers you can use as SMS Sender ID will be the phone numbers assigned to the SIM cards by the network operator. The advantage to using a wireless connection is that it is easy to setup, and often you can send and receive SMS messages free of charge over wireless links. (In fact many SMS service providers run a business of purchasing SMS modem pools with SIM cards and they sell the SMS messages and phone numbers to their clients over the Internet by providing an HTTP sms service.)

How to connect your SMS gateway to a mobile network operator

To send large volumes of SMS messages, a direct connection to the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) of a mobile network operator, or to a high capacity on-line SMS service is a good option. Mobile network operators and top SMS providers offer SMPP client connection or other heavy-duty SMS protocols, such as the UCP sms protocol, the CIMD2 sms protocol or the OZX sms protocol. In most cases you can connect to these providers through a secure SSL link. You may check out the how to create a secure smpp client connection guide on getting more information about this connection option.

How to connect your SMS gateway to an HTTP SMS service provider

The third option to connect your system to the mobile network is to connect to an HTTP SMS service provider. Although the HTTP protocol is not the most efficient option to send and receive SMS messages, because it puts a large data overhead on each SMS, and it does not support SMS delivery reports and inbound SMS messages properly, it is still used by many businesses. The primary reason for this is that an HTTP SMS connection can be setup very effortlessly.

To connect your system to an HTTP SMS service, you need to sign up to the service on their website, and you need to enter the account details they provide into Ozeki SMS Gateway. A list of supported SMS service providers can be found in our On-line SMS service providers page. You will find step by step instructions for each provider on how to connect to their service.

Installation options

You may install your SMS gateway in your own server room to a physical or on a virtual server. A physical PC gives the best performance, a virtual pc can be great for system management and easy backups. All major virtualization platforms are supported (Linux Kvm, Oracle, VmWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc). As the host OS, you can install the SMS gateway on Windows or you may setup the SMS gateway on Linux.

Install your SMS gateway into the Cloud if you don't wish to operate a system on premises. Ozeki SMS Gateway supports installation into Amazon AWS, installation into Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace, Sigmanet, MHosting and many other cloud providers. This option requires a VPS service, that offers Windows or Linux servers.

For smaller operations, you may even install Ozeki SMS Gateway on an Android mobile phone, which gives you instant connection to the mobile network.

If you are into IoT sensors and hardware, you may choose to install Ozeki SMS Gateway on a Raspberry Pi. This gives you direct access to sensors and actuators attached to your embedded system. IoT Ozeki installations often communicate with a central Ozeki Gateway installed into the cloud.

How to provide SMS service with your SMS gateway

Once your SMS gateway is connected to your mobile networks you can create user accounts to provide SMS service to your business applications, to your office users or to your customers over the Internet. If you wish you can even become an SMS service provider.

Your SMS business applications will connect to your SMS gateway through one of the SMS APIs provided by the SMS gateway. They can send SMS through HTTP requests, through a database or by simply creating a text file in certain directory.

Office users will use the HTTP user interface of the SMS gateway from a web browser, or they will use an E-mail to SMS configuration or send sms from Excel.

If you want to offer SMS service to your customers or to remote offices you can configure the built in SMPP server of Ozeki SMS Gateway. Yes, Ozeki SMS Gateway can offer the same SMS service, that is offered by Mobile Network Operators. It has built in very powerful SMPP server.

Setup a high performance SMPP server

Ozeki 10 SMS gateway is the best software if you wish to provide SMS services for your customers, office users or business applications. If you are interested in setting up a robust system, you will be thrilled once you experience the outstanding performance of the built in SMPP server. But don't take our word for it. Setup a test system free of charge in your own network, and push one million messages through it in real time! You will experience firsthand the performance, and you will know that this is the best SMS gateway software out there. You will see, that the system is capable of delivering up to 1000 SMS messages per second and can do this over a sustained period of time.

If you wish to provide SMS service to your customers, office users or business applications, you will also like our client software offerings. Client software such as the Ozeki SMS Client, the Excel client or the Ozeki C# SMS api dll can be distributed without any limitations free of charge to your users. Your software developers will like the powerful HTTP SMS API. System administrators will be satisfied with the SMS routing capabilities and the high performance SQL reporting. We are proud of our SQL reporting implementation because we know that it will not lose any messages, even if your reporting database server goes offline temporarily. If the database is inaccessible, the messages will be temporarily saved into a text file and will be pushed to the database once it comes back again.

Your users deserve outstanding reliability and performance, and Ozeki 10 SMS Gateway is here to deliver just that. Check out the information below to find out more.

Use advanced SMS routing

Ozeki SMS gateway has a world class SMS routing engine. This routing engine allows you to forward SMS messages from one user or mobile network connection to another based on conditions you define. There is a large number of conditions, such as phone number prefix, message text matching, service period or time of day. In addition to routing by pattern matching, the SMS routing engine also allows you to modify the SMS text messages on the fly. You can replace the phone numbers, change the message text, append a note to the end of the messages. Find out more about SMS routing in the SMS routing basics guide.

Email to SMS for Exchange and Outlook

Office users in 2024 use Microsoft Office 365 whether they work from home, from a remote location or from your Office desktops. This means that they are hooked up to Microsoft Exchange that runs in the Azure cloud or in their on-premises data centre. Ozeki 10 SMS gateway can be easily configured to provide Email to SMS for Exchange.

Many Office users use Outlook, Windows mail, and some use Thunderbird as their primary email client. Ozeki SMS Gateway can be used to create email to sms and sms to email forwarding for these clients. You can find a standalone guide that explains how you can send sms from Windows Mail and how you can send sms from Mozilla Thunderbird.

Email to SMS for Linux based e-mail servers

In addition to Office 365 / Exchange support Ozeki SMS gateway offers standard email to sms and sms to email forwarding for other popular Email systems, such as Postfix, Sendmail, etc.... These standard e-mail systems use the SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols. Ozeki offers a secure implementation for all of these protocols. You can read more about these options by following the links bellow.

• SMS to email using POP3
• SMS to email using IMAP
• Email to SMS using SMTP

Easy to use GUI

The Ozeki SMS gateway user interface is very easy to use. It can be accessed from a web browser. (The web browser is served by the built in webserver of the SMS Gateway software). When you open the home page of the SMS gateway, you will see 4 panels as shown on the figure below. The left panel contains the installed mobile network connections. The middle two panels contain routing rules. The right panel contains the list of users and applications.

The first task you will do after installing Ozeki 10 SMS gateway, is setting up a connection to the mobile network. Next you will likely create user accounts, or you will create an API access for software developers. Finally, you will setup reporting to keep track of costs and to control the user activity in your service. The following pages provide useful information to complete these tasks:

Send SMS from applications

The best way to build a business is to rely on software instead of human work. Your automated software solutions will work precisely and reliable 24/7. Check out the following options offered for software developers by Ozeki 10 SMS Gateway. Developers can use these APIs to integrate SMS functionality into your applications, to make day-to-day operations more efficient.

SMS APIs for developers
Send SMS using HTTP
PHP SMS API
C# SMS API
VB.NET SMS API

Send SMS from a database

Many companies use relational database systems to store their data and their systems communicate with the databases using SQL. Ozeki 10 SMS gateway offers an easy way to create SMS functionality if you use a database. All you have to do is setup two database tables: one for sending SMS and another for receiving SMS and let Ozeki pick up the SMS messages to send using an SQL SELECT statement, and insert the incoming SMS messages using an SQL INSERT statement. More information about such a setup can be found in our SQL to SMS setup guide. Database server specific configurations are listed below.

SQL to SMS configurations:

Send SMS from Microsoft SQL Server
Send SMS from Microsoft Access
Send SMS from Oracle
Send SMS from MySQL
Send SMS from PostgreSQL
Send SMS from SAP SQL Anywhere

Send SMS from Excel

Office users wish to use simple tools they are already familiar with and tools that already contain the data they work with. Such tools are Microsoft Excel, Access and E-mail. The following links help you provide tools for your Office users to make it easy for them to send and receive SMS messages from the office PC's. You can send SMS from Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, you can create Txt files with a list of phone numbers and messages text or you can use an Email to SMS configuration.