Question

I am dealing with publicity for a particular event and i was wondering how companies managed to send large number of sms to their customers? I had come across a php script which uses free sms gateways like way2sms etc , is there anyway i can achieve this or an any alternate solution to notify a large number of people. I have also seen a few bluetooth services which notify people in a particular bluetooth region. Please give me some references i can go through to implement either a bluetooth or message facility.

Answer 1

There is a lot of ways to do that
I’ll talk from my own experience

I use Kannel to connect to providers using http and SMPP

Kannel will free you from managing queue (at least you have to create a db for it), it will manage connections and keep them up.
The only problem, you should have an access to *nix system, it can compile on windows but I never seen a real installation over windows

After setting up the connection with Kannel, you communicate to it using a well defined http API

The advantage of Kannel is stability with hundred of millions of messages!, yes the number is correct, I used it with more than 20 mobile company from one sun solaris box and managed into one of the links 300’000 message daily ( unfortunately the throttling stopped me from sending more 🙁 )

Try to find providers with SMPP links, it much more stable then http, and a system like Kannel should kill the complexities of dealing with a protocol on the low level

For the other part of the question, Bluetooth, our company was approached more that a year back from this company, they did a nice demo but I never worked with them directly, thought the hint may help you at least to find similar solutions