How to setup a SMS Gateway on Windows 7 and test with .NET

CSharp Coder picture CSharp Coder · Sep 16, 2010 · Viewed 11.4k times · Source

My company is working for a Telco who will allow us to send/receive sms using their gateway eventually but for now I need a sms gateway setup on my Win7 box that I can used to test and build an applicaton that sends and optionally receive sms messages.

I have had a look at Kannel but I cant seem to find a Win7 version or dont know how to compile and setup one on Win7.

If someone has any experience in this then please help me. Thanks

Answer

Fanis Hatzidakis picture Fanis Hatzidakis · Sep 17, 2010

If you will be connecting to the telco it will probably be to their SMSC directly via SMPP or similar protocols, which means you will need to setup something to talk to that. Kannel is an excellent open source implementation of an SMS Gateway, and probably your best bet at this. It will take care of talking with the telco's SMSC, and will provide you with a simple HTTP based interface to submit messages to from your application.

In that case, you are better off trying to set it up sooner rather than later, because quite a bit is involved in Kannel's configuration. It requires linux based systems to run and there is no windows port.

However, in order to get started developing your application, you can look into a fake SMS Gateway that will accept the same HTTP interface as Kannel, and return back made up replies. A quick and dirty way would be to write a simple web page in any language you wish, that will accept a few parameters over a web request and print out "55124" for the new message id, or similar. Then your application can do a simple HTTP call to it to simulate sending an sms:

http://smsgateway.local/simulator.php?to=12345678&from=12345&body=hello+there

If you want something more realistic look at this list of software. There are some libraries for sending sms via mobile phone connected serially, and SMPPSim which looks like it could work for you for this.