How PageGate Sends SMS

Video Transcript

Welcome to the overview of how to send SMS with PageGate. In this tutorial, we'll be going over the different delivery methods available for sending text messages using PageGate.

There are two primary styles of SMS delivery: Internet and Hardware. Of the two, cellular hardware generally tends to be more reliable as it sends SMS just like a cell phone does; there's no internet-to-sms translation gateway involved. Cellular hardware comes in two varieties: modem and gateway. Cellular modems are easier to use with physical systems as they connect by USB or RS-232 and cellular gateways are easier to use with virtual systems as they can be reached by TCP from VMs.

PageGate supports many different command sets and interaction methods for cellular hardware and the specific makes and models of device you interact with don't necessarily matter to the program. What matters is that your hardware supports a method of receiving SMS delivery commands; whether that's with an AT command set or custom command language via Telnet, SSH or direct connection.

On the internet side of things, there are carrier public gateways, carrier enterprise gateways, general SMS delivery services, public safety delivery services and medical industry delivery services. Many carriers support email-to-SMS as a free method of delivering messages. However, the carriers' public email-to-SMS gateways are not always reliable and are volume restricted. They should be avoided for high priority messaging, such as public safety and emergency management environments.

General and high volume SMS delivery services provide some free and generally low cost SMS delivery options. These services include things like AWSSNS, Twilio, MessageBird, Telnyx, Teli and similar. Each service has a special API you'll communicate with and you will need to provide the appropriate security keys to PageGate for messaging.

Senders in the public safety industry have access to specialized SMS delivery services like Active911, IamResponding, Chief Messaging, eDispatches and many others. These services have ways of taking CAD data and providing it to first responders' devices, allowing them to see geoposition, mapping and other critical data. Most public safety messaging services support multiple hosts or methods of delivery, allowing you to configure a failover system in PageGate for redundancy.

Senders in the medical industry have access to specialized SMS delivery services, like TigerConnect, DocHalo, Voalte and similar, that allow for HIPAA compliant messaging. These services provide secure APIs and hosts you can deliver messages through, insuring HIPAA compliance.

Last, we have the carrier enterprise systems. Most cellular carriers have their own respective enterprise messaging platforms and these gateways are ultimately faster and more reliable than the publicly available SMTP-to-SMS system. Access to these gateways is usually not provided free of charge. The notable exception is that Verizon offers public safety free access to their EMAG platform.

This concludes the video tutorial on how PageGate sends SMS. For more information, including how to configure the methods described in this tutorial, please visit our website, www.notepage.net.