Can Asterisk accept and send SMS?

Question

Is it possible to send and receive SMS over Asterisk? I am using Asterisk for my communications and it works pretty good. I just wish that I could send SMS to my callers.

thanks

Answer 1

It depends a bit on what you want to achieve how you go about doing things. You can hook up hardware (like an old analogue phone) and use an asterisk module to send commands to it which then effectively sms from a phone.

Some mobile companies offer an analogue line dial in service with an anologue modem (remember those?!) hanging off the back of them allowing you dial in and send a text with some commands.

This idea has been extended by some phone companies to be APIs allowing you to send a simple command over the internet (often a call to a URL via a script) which trigger a text to be sent. These often operate on a credit-based system - e.g. you pay for credits on your account and then are charged per SMS - 1, 2 3 or 4 credits depending on the destination. Some companies also offer a two-way SMS service which will also call back to your system. There are Asterisk and/or FreePBX modules for some of the companies' APIs making set up very straight forward. Some of the Asterisk applications/modules will pass the SMS information using IAX but you still need a way (ie a provider/partner/telco/sms reseller) to pass on the message to the wider world.

You said you thought some of the stuff you Googled sounded complicated. I guess it is but only because there are a number of ways of doing things and it depends a bit on what you want to do. If you say what you're after in more detail, someone can probably help you further.