Reselling short or multimedia message service texts is a job that requires a healthy list of business skills. Personnel have to be aware of who their clients are and what they need. Technical information is a big part of this, and it shouldn’t be neglected when it comes time to bone up on some new material.
Vital Network Stack Tools For Resellers
Telephone company central office locations manage most of the network stack, which means that resellers tend to be left in the dark as to where their message is going whenever they send out broadcasts to many readers all at once. Tracing a text through a cellular tower all the way to each individual cross-connect box and piece of twin-lead that it goes through is nearly impossible. Packet analyzers can help by giving users an overhead view of network traffic.
The average SMS reseller usually only needs a third-party white-label service to provide services for outside agents. Few are going to need to follow each and every message to its destination. One thing they should take a closer look at, though, is a gateway application that connects email inboxes with SMS apps.
Wireless carriers usually provide a dedicated domain to send and receive text messages through, even when one side isn’t connected to a mobile network. Users simply need to point their Internet message access protocol software to an email address that starts with the recipient’s phone number followed by said carrier’s domain. As soon as said email hits a wire centre, it becomes an SMS text. This is due to the clever application of a sophisticated container format.
Encoding Text Message Data
Unicode is the most common encoding scheme wireless carriers rely on when sending rich text. This scheme matches the character map programs that are usually found on most desktop personal computers. It includes code points for everything from emoji to characters used when writing ideograph-based languages like Japanese.
Resellers will want to ensure they’re capable of processing messages stored in Unicode and the much simpler American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which lacks many of the richer characters of the more developed platform.
ASCII is compatible with the Unicode network interchange format to some degree, which means that nearly all Unicode-based applications resellers might use should support it. International marketers might encounter problems when working with alternate encoding schemes, so sending out a few test messages before sticking with any single backend solution is important. Though it’s not absolutely necessary, they might also want to invest in a solution that provides at least rudimentary coverage for uuencode files.
Less Common Encapsulation Schemes
While uuencode might have been more popular when sending files over text messages was difficult, it’s still found its way into some niche uses today. Resellers who work with highly technical businesses that have to send messages back and forth between programmers or academics will find this useful. Support for ISCII, which is used to some degree by certain agencies in India, has also become an important consideration, although Unicode is helping to phase it out.
Compression technology is also useful, though it can present dedicated resellers with some sticky security problems. Deflate is going to be the most popular scheme that resellers run into. This combination of Huffman coding and LZ77 compression powers zip archives and gzip tarballs, meaning its online use is almost ubiquitous. Few marketing specialists need to know the insides of these libraries, but they may want to ensure that their network stack provides at least some support for them.
Most resellers aren’t going to need to become telecommunications network engineers to do their jobs, but it’s important to keep an eye on developments in the space. Give extra attention to new apps and services that are about to hit the market, and your organization should stay competitive for a long time.
Read More:
