1. SMPP integration guide
2. What is the difference between SMS Mo and Mt?
3. What is the difference between A2P and P2P SMS?
4. What do the different states mean (Buffered, Delivered, etc.)
5. My SMS is larger than 160 characters. Is it possible to concatenate?
6. What is a “Source address”?
7. Is there any limit regarding SMS?

SMPP integration guide

Please visit our Developer Hub to access the SMPP integration guide.

What is the difference between SMS Mo and Mt

There are two kinds of SMS:

• Mobile Originated (MO) SMS when a device sends a message
• Mobile Terminated (MT) SMS when a device receives a message

In the EUI, they will appear differently and will also be charged differently. This is a reason why you can enable or disable SMS MO or MT for your endpoints in the basic configuration of your "Service Policy", available in the "Device Policy" section.

Not all SMS MT will appear in the EUI as our SMS Center (SMSC) does not handle messages sent by devices using other providers (Vodafone or Deutsche Telecom for example). This is the difference between A2P and P2P SMS

What is the difference between A2P vs P2P SMS

• A2P stands for Application to Person. One-way SMS to which recipients are not expected to reply. A2P messaging includes but is not limited to marketing messages, appointment reminders, notifications and pin codes.A2P SMS MT, always go through our SMSC and are therefore registered in the EUI.
• P2P stands for Person to Person: two way messaging like when you use your phone to send a text message to a friend. P2P SMS MT go through an SMSC that EMnify does not control. We therefore cannot know if a message has been received and cannot display any information in the EUI.

Via the EUI, under "Device Policies->Service Policies" you can also choose to enable or disable P2P or A2P SMS.

To update some devices, like GPS trackers eg, an Over The Air (OTA) update is sometimes necessary. Those happen via SMS and will be considered as A2P SMS MT ie handled by EMnify's SMSC and displayed in the EUI. Such devices are not always connected to the network though, they sometimes only connect once a day. For such devices, we implemented the SMS Buffering.

What do the different states mean? (Buffered, Delivered, etc.)

Here is an overview of the different states of SMS the EUI may display:

My SMS is larger than 160 characters. Can I concatenate SMS? 

To overcome the limitation of 160 characters on a single SMS, the message is split into several SMS by the sending device and recombined at the receiving end. 

One way of sending concatenated SMS (CSMS) is to split the message into 153 7-bit character parts, and sending each part with a User Data Header (UDH) added onto the beginning.

It is possible to use a 16-bit CSMS reference number in order to reduce the probability that two different concatenated messages are sent with identical reference numbers to a receiver.

What is the "Source Address"?

When sending SMS to your endpoints using the SMS console on the EUI, you need to input a source address. The default value is "EMnify", but this can be replaced by any other alphanumerical value.

Is the any limit regarding SMS?

For P2P SMS (involving external phone numbers), there is a limit of 5 SMS MO per connected device / 24hours. Once the limit is reached, an event will be generated:

“SMS MO P2P Limit reached”

24 hours after the first SMS was sent, the limit will be disabled and you will be able to send additional SMS. 

We will only block the message towards the external phone number, but the SMS will be displayed in the SMS console, in case you have any application reading the content.

If you need a higher limit, please contact your Customer Success Manager. Please consider that it can take up to 7 days to change this.