The SMS Gateway

Premium SMS is a payment method, which allows the Customer to pay with his mobile phone bill, but without usage of a Credit card. In order to pay for some service, the Customer sends SMS to the Provider’s number and receives a digital access code to his phone. At this moment, the Customer’s phone bill is charged and the money is transferred to the Provider’s account. This payment style is ideal for so-called “micro-payments”.

A Premium SMS allows you to pay for things using your mobile phone, with the charge that appears on you monthly phone bill. Premium SMS Services are mobile contents or information services that can be accessed by text or via Mobile Internet. It includes chat services, voting on different TV or radio shows, entering competitions, receiving information updates, and buying content, like ringtones, wallpapers, mobile themes, or even music videos. Many premium SMS services uses 6 or 8 digit shortcodes as the number to send the SMS message to.

Premium SMS is not available on all mobile brands. You have to contact your mobile carrier if you can have an access on the Premium SMS Services on your plan.

You may ask yourself why WAP was developed. Well, ask no more because it was developed in order to meet the increasing demand for mobility, enabling consumers and employees to access information and transact wherever they are. The development of WAP, is owned by several business companies such as Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and many others. The applications are widespread for the corporate and the consumer. On the consumer side, the technology will enable us to use our time more effectively by facilitating wireless retailing, banking and information retrieval such as weather, traffic and news.

On the corporate side the applications such as mobile intra and extranets will enable employees and business partners to access data in a cost and time efficient manner, thus improving employee productivity and therefore overall business performance.

However, the underlying advantage for businesses is the constant availability of their services, which will be the key to commercial competitiveness in the long-term.

The first commercial mobile phone service was launched in Japan by NTT in 1978. By November 2007, the total number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world had reached 3.3 billion, or half of the human population (although some users have multiple subscriptions, or inactive subscriptions), which also makes the mobile phone the most widely spread technology and the most common gadget in the world.[3]

The first mobile phone to enable internet connectivity and wireless email, the Nokia Communicator, was released in 1996, creating a new category of expensive phones called smartphones. In 1999 the first mobile internet service was launched by NTT DoCoMo in Japan under the i-Mode service. By 2007 over 798 million people around the world accessed the internet or equivalent mobile internet services such as WAP and i-Mode at least occasionally using a mobile phone rather than a personal computer.