Oracle-L: RE: Telephone Alerts

From: Mark Leith <mark_at_cool-tools.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 06:48:20 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.0045F498.20020513064820@fatcity.com>

Simon,

Working with a tools company that provides a monitoring tool for Oracle - we have had a lot of call for sending alerts to SMS. We've done a fair bit of testing of various SMS providers in the UK so that we can try to recommend a valid solution to our customers - that is able to alert a user with a consistently good response time. The "norm" is to use an "SMS gateway", where you send a standard email to a an SMS Gateway provider - who then forward that email in SMS form to your mobile phone. We've tried various people such as Genie (BT's) now called mmo2, http://www.uboot.com, http://www.iobox.com etc. etc. all of which have had poor response times at various times in the day due to user traffic..

There is also the possibility of getting tools that people have pre-built to send SMS from a desktop - or server.. Many of these are pretty good in GUI form, but when it comes to command line support, they are usually very lacking to none - and let's face it if we wanted to use it, or if you wanted to call it from a shell type script you *need* command line support.. And if there is command line support - most of the time these are made by people in other countries, and don't seem to support our UK service providers such as Orange, One-2-One, and to a slightly lesser extent Vodafone.

If we are asked to provide SMS alerts for our tools, we now point our customers to a company called Textforce (http://www.textforce.net) which is actually supposed to be a targeted marketing type site for sending marketing SMS messages. It's a "pay per message" provider - with each SMS being around 7-8 pence.. The only reason we actually recommend to our customers that they use this site - is that throughout our entire testing, this site provided response times (from the time the email was sent, to the time the SMS was received) of between 30 seconds - 4 minutes consistently! Many of the other providers, such as genie, or uboot et al have greatly differing response times - from 20 seconds right up to 14 hours!

I'd still be interested though if anybody has any experience with server based tools that are available (for things such as Sun, HP, AIX, NT/2000) that do have command line support, and also support the major UK providers..

HTH Mark

 Mark Leith             | T: +44 (0)1905 330 281
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-----Original Message-----
Gorbatchev
Sent: 13 May 2002 14:48
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Some mobile network providers make use of email gateway for sms. In that case you have some email address which is redirected by your provider to your phone.

Alexandre
----- Original Message -----
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Sent: Monday, May 13, 2002 3:03 PM

We have some UNIX batch processes that send us e-mails when they have finished.

Does anyone have any experience of sending a SMS message to a mobile phone?

Simon Fox
Room 221
Furlong House
Queens Drive
NOTTINGHAM
NG2 1AL
Phone 0115 957 6536
Fax 0115 957 6548

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Author: Mark Leith
INET: mark_at_cool-tools.co.uk

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