[kwlug-disc] SMS support from VoIP providers (was "Voicemail by email")

[Denver Gingerich]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Stephen Paul Weber
<singpolyma at singpolyma.net> wrote:
> Somebody claiming to be Chris Irwin wrote:
>>Browsing through their feature list, I see that they support SMS! Have you
>>used this? How does it work?
>
> It was a bit rough when I first signed up, but they've made great
> improvements to it.  I do basically all of my SMSing over XMPP throug
> vitelity these days.

I use Vitelity as well and have found the SMS service quite reliable
(no message receipt/delivery failures) after they worked out some
kinks last year.  When I first started using their service in July,
they had some issues with the XMPP server, which I reported and they
fixed fairly quickly.

As for how it works: you login to their XMPP server using
<your_10-digit_number>@s.ms and then you can send/receive SMS using
<10-digit_number>@sms contacts (note that your contacts are "@sms",
not "@s.ms").  All you pay is US$1.49/month for a DID; there is no
per-message charge for SMS send/receive.  I'm not sure if they support
send/receive to/from numbers outside Canada and the US, but I've sent
within and between Canada/US no problem.

There are other services I've used that have lower DID cost (with
per-message prices as low as $0.004/msg), but probably Vitelity is
easiest to connect to as you can just login with an XMPP client (like
Pidgin or Adium).

Denver
http://ossguy.com/