User Guide

Table Of Contents
About SMS and ColdFusion 1069
About SMS providers
Before you can deploy an SMS application, you must establish an account with a provider that
supports SMPP 3.4 over TCP/IP. There are generally two kinds of providers:
Telecommunications carriers such as nation-wide cellular phone providers
Third-party SMPP aggregators
The type of provider and specific provider you use should depend on your needs and provider
capabilities and price structures. Less expensive providers may have slower response times.
Telecommunications carriers might be more expensive but might provide more throughput and
faster SMPP response times.
How the SMS event gateway and provider SMSC interact
This section provides a brief overview of the interactions between the ColdFusion MX SMS event
gateway and the SMPP providers SMSC. It is designed to help you to understand the basics of
SMPP interactions, and defines the terms necessary to for you to understand gateway
configuration and message handling. For more details, see the SMPP specification, which is
available at www.smsforum.net/.
A typical interaction between an SMSC and a ColdFusion SMS event gateway instance consists
of messages, or PDUs sent between the two entities, such as a mobile device and a ColdFusion
MX event gateway instance (and therefore, and event gateway application). The following
sections describe these interactions and how you handle them in ColdFusion MX.
Gateway binding
The event gateway must bind to the SMSC before they can communicate. The SMS event
gateway instance initiates a binding by sending a bind_transceiver PDU to the SMSC, which
includes the gateways ID and password. If the initial bind request fails, the gateway retries the
bind at the rate specified by the gateway configuration file retry-interval value until either the
bind is successful or the gateway reaches the maximum number of retries, specified by the retries
configuration value. If the bind operation fails, ColdFusion logs an error to the eventgateway.log
file, and you must restart the gateway instance in the ColdFusion MX Administrator to establish
the connection.
Note: Some SMSCs can send a prohibited status in response to a bind request. If the gateway
receives such a status response, it sets the retry interval to one minute and the maximum number of
retries to 15. The SMS gateway detects SMPP 5.0-compliant and AT&T prohibited status
responses.
When the SMSC accepts the bind request, it returns a bind_transceiver_resp PDU. The binding
remains in effect until the gateway instance shuts down and sends an unbind PDU to the SMSC.
Because the gateway binds as a transceiver, it can initiate messages to the SMSC, and the SMSC
can send messages to it.