SMPP: Great Choice for Top SMS Messaging Performance
CTO Izabel Jelenic blogs about the Short Message Peer-to-Peer protocol, one of the backbones of our robust A2P messaging infrastructure.
Once there was a world without text messaging, but to be honest – none of us seem to remember living in it. Over the last 21 years, SMS has changed the world of communication, and nowadays we see it growing rapidly in enterprise environments, authentication systems, and security solutions.
Infobip has been around since the infancy of SMS and today we are proud to look back on all those years we spent building our robust, geo-redundant A2P messaging infrastructure. Trusted by thousands of companies and mobile network operators, it had a downtime of only 4 minutes in 2013, and it kept setting technical standards in global A2P messaging.
SMPP doing wonders for functionality and SMS volumes
One of the ways of connecting to our platform – we’re processing over 4000 SMS/sec! – is the SMPP protocol, designed specifically for SMS. We often call it the silent warrior, for all the wonderful things it does in transmitting large amounts of messages around the world. Throughout the years, it’s been one of our top concerns to make it easily available for clients, regardless of their system’s technical diversity.
Naturally, our platform supports HTTP (REST, XML, …) and other protocols, and does it equally well, but it’s good to know that SMPP, since it was designed for SMS in the first place, gives extraordinary performance. For companies that connect to our infrastructure with SMPP, there are essentially no limitations in terms of volumes and functionality they can obtain. Because SMPP is asynchronous in its basis, it enables high throughput rates despite any Internet latencies. As we have SMPP at the foundation of our platform, there is no special account setup in order to use it – our clients can use their credentials for SMPP as well as for other protocols.
Moreover, we expanded SMPP with additional TLV fields, to enrich our services and send additional information such as prices, ported network information etc.
We do all the work – less headache for your IT department
We’ve accomplished the feat of ensuring no latency or delays thanks to system architecture with separate layers (TCP / SMPP-HTTP-Other API/ core nodes). All layers are easily manageable by our engineers, allowing us to seamlessly upgrade core nodes (that are handling the traffic) and deploy new features without any influence on the SMPP or any other exposed API. This is just a rough outline of our infrastructure that supports our clients’ messaging: we do all the work so your IT department has one less headache.
Implementing an SMPP bind can seem like a complicated task, but with Infobip always there to facilitate integration, it really isn’t. We have prearranged configurations for widespread SMPP clients (NowSMS, Kannel etc). If you are using some other SMPP client, we can help by either suggesting correct parameters for you to implement, or by applying specific settings for your bind at our end. Our support teams can even analyse the TCP stream and help you with the setup, when needed.
SMPP is one of the pillars of our platform and we encourage clients to utilise this bind in order to achieve the highest throughput rates and the best possible connection to our platform. SMPP is available to all our clients with a simple procedure, and our engineers are working daily to make it better and better.
