The French Overseas Territories of Reunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe have been busy blocking the SS7 routes into their network. To ensure high delivery and great support, Nexmo is pleased to announce the launch of our local connectivity to the networks in these countries.

La Reunion & Mayotte: Prefix +262, MCC 647

Martinique: Prefix +596, MCC 340

Guadeloupe: Prefix +590, MCC 340

Please be advised, messages using the French National Access Codes need to be sent using the local Country Code, ie, 0690xxx (Guadeloupe) needs to come in as +590xxx, for now at least +33690 will not work.

Nexmo is pleased to announce in addition to our LandLine Virtual Numbers, we now offer UK Channel Islands Mobile Virtual Numbers. These also come with a good international inbound reach.

 The numbers are priced at the same level as the landline numbers - eur 0.50 per number per month. Simply go to the usual place and select United Kingdom from the drop down, then type ‘447’ into the MSISDN box and search. As with all our numbers, it is FREE to receive incoming SMS!

 Information on the inbound reach can be found here.

 More markets on the way - watch this space!

This is a guest entry by Syed Asim Imtiaz, the mastermind behind InDash.

InDash for Nexmo is an easy to use utility to process your incoming text messages without writing a single line of code. It is not only an SMS auto-responder, but it also helps you to quickly setup a dashboard for your Nexmo numbers and view your incoming messages. With InDash, you can forward messages to an email address, a web application or browser plugin in real-time. It also features a keyword-based processor which means that you can use a single incoming number for multiple / different scenarios, use-cases and applications by using unique keywords.

If you are a developer than Nexmo already provides an easy-to-use API bundled with an extremely developer-friendly documentation - which makes the integration job, a no-brainer. However, if you are looking to quickly prototype a proof-of-concept for your next SMS-powered application or to hack up a one-off script that harnesses the power of SMS — this is really where InDash can make your life easier. Let me walk you through an example:

The Problem

We are organizing a High-Tea event for a local community of bloggers. The event is invitation based and the seats are limited (20 to be exact). We want to give the guests a very simple and quick way to tell us if they will be attending the event so that we can book the venue accordingly. Ideally, guests should RSVP by sending us a text message, e.g.:

SMS-based RSVP App

The idea is simple and straight forward. We will send out invitations and will request our guests to RSVP by sending a text message on a number. When we receive an RSVP request, we should reserve a seat and confirm it by replying to the text message with a reservation number. If there are no seats left we should inform the guest about it so as to avoid any last-minute inconvenience and disappointment. 

InDash, Nexmo and a short-and-sweet PHP script will help us achieve this. Here’s how:

Step-by-step guide

1. Login to InDash using your Nexmo credentials (if you haven’t got one, click here to sign up).

2. If you’re a new user — you will have to point your Nexmo account to callback InDash when incoming messages arrive. You can do this by simply clicking on the “Auto-Configure” button and InDash will take care of the rest. If you have already done this before, you can skip this step.

3. Setup a unique keyword (or a dedicated incoming number) to callback your RSVP PHP script (we will create this in the next step). The CALL URL AND REPLY feature in InDash is the one we want. When a text message is received, InDash posts it to the URL and sends a reply back to the sender with the content returned by the URL. In our case, our PHP script will simply have to emit a line which will be sent back as an SMS reply, auto-magically, thanks to InDash.

4. Now, about the RSVP PHP script. As mentioned above, our script doesn’t need to do any thing complicated. It receives a call when a message is received, it tries to reserve a seat and emits out a response. InDash will automatically send the response returned as a reply to the sender. Here’s the code snippet that does the job:

https://gist.github.com/f044aff9185260dd6f59

Obviously there are bugs in the script but do note that our PHP script doesn’t know anything about Nexmo (or anything remotely related to SMS for that matter). Cool, isn’t it? You can imagine easily extending this app to talk to much sophisticated event registration systems like EventBrite using their API.

And that is it for now. Do give InDash a try - it is completely free to use and because Nexmo doesn’t charge you for any incoming messages (once you purchase a number) — combining them makes a very cost-effective yet powerful solution. Feel free to get in touch with me if you’ve any query, feedback or suggestion. You can reach me via my website or grab me on twitter.

Brazil is a massive market and has always been problematic with regards to SMS delivery. Carriers either blocks international SMS or simply don’t support them. We’ve tried many solutions including SS7. Nothing really works well and is stable.

We are announcing today Nexmo local direct links to Brazil that will improve delivery and provide a stable alternative to the current existing routes. Beta clients who have been testing Nexmo local links have seen anything between 2x to 50x improvements in their conversion ratio!

The new direct links support delivery to ported numbers, don’t provide DLR, concatenated, binary and unicode are not supported. Message length is 157 characters. And finally sender id is a local short code such as 27199. Marketing, political and religious content is not allowed.

Turkey is one of these markets where SS7 does not work properly and can be expensive. Vodafone is filtering on alphanumeric sender and local numbers in national and international format…and keep changing the rules of its filter! Turkcell filters across the board and has imposed a very high interworking fees on SS7.

But Turkey is market that can not be ignored! It is one of the fasted growing mobile markets in Europe with over 70m mobile phones.

With Nexmo new local direct links, you can improve delivery and reduce cost. Success ratio is constantly over 95% and DLR ratio is at 100%! If you are sending sensitive content such as password delivery or important alerts than you will see you conversion ratio improved. But that is not all! Price has been reduced to EUR 0.021/SMS across the board. The local link is fully featured including handset DLR and portability support, except the sender that will be replaced by “NXSMS”.