Hi Everyone,

I am very new to SMS services and development and want to learn this technology. But I am not sure how to go about it. I have read overviews about SMS but thats about it.

I want to setup an SMS service (i am located in the US) which can answer questions sent by people using their mobile phones. All I understand about that is the following:

Cell Phone - SMS Center (Wireless Provider) - SMS Gateway - Content Server

A user who wants to get some information using SMS (like weather or latest score) will send an SMS to a particular number. This will be processed by the SMS Center and will be relayed to the SMS Gateway registered with that center. The gateway will contact the content server and provide the necessary content.

In the above structure, I think if I want to setup a service, I will have to setup the SMS Gateway and the content server. The problem is the concept of the SMSC.

For starting out, I do not want to register with an SMSC but instead focus on setting up an SMS Gateway and content server. And I want to do it using any open source or trail software, hopefully available on Linux.

My question is... how do i go about doing this. For now, I want to bypass the SMSC all together. What I want to do is setup the Gateway and content server, and be able to communicate with the Gateway directly, using a phone simulator on a PC. Is this possible? (I think registering with an SMSC by paying money will be the easy part later on ;) )

I tried searching online for such information a lot, but I was not successful enough. I tried using Openwave but was not able to get its Phone Simulator to work (due to my very limited knowledge) and looked at NowSMS but it says I need to have a registration with an SMSC (as far as I could understand). Any other ways of doing this?

Sorry for such a detailed post. I would really appreciate any help because I have spent 2 weekends trying to research on this and have not reached anywhere.

Thanks a lot!