An SMS Gateway service for Zimbabwe

At this point in history, Zimbabwe is we hope about to reconstruct itself. It is possible that by using some innovative, high-tech, simple, low-cost or zero-cost techniques (most but not all utilising ICT), then this reconstruction can be assisted and accelerated.

Since ownership of and/or access to PC’s and high-end mobile phones is quite low for Zimbabwe, it would be very nice to expand the potential user base by enabling owners and/or users of simple mobile phones to also participate in such systems. Simple mobile phone ownership in Zimbabwe is probably 7% of the current population (700,000 persons). PC access is probably 20,000. High-end (data-capable) mobile phone ownership is probably 35,000, of whom probably very few actually use data services (econet.co.zw have figures for the number of phones using their GPRS data service)...

To do that, one needs to set up and operate an sms gateway service.

If a complementary service such as www.cd3wd.com/SAM/ is set up, then the percentage of the population which can participate tends towards 100%

Once that sms gateway service is in place, a number of competitive or monopolistic Interactive Data Services (IDSs) can spring up to serve the public. These can include:

- Mobile banking (see www.cd3wd.com/SPS/ )

- Classified adverts (B2C and C2C) – submission and search – buy and sell, including jobs, houses for sale, houses and apartments to rent, and cars

- Trading systems (B2B) – for example which search for best price and availability in a geographical region for a specific item or spare part by querying the inventory of several or many stockists. An extended manual module for this system can also allow small traders to compete on a level playing field...

- All kinds of e-government systems for submitting applications and getting response, tracking progress. Such systems could assist to minimise or eliminate corruption.

- A small farmer inputs microfinance system which largely automates the process of issuing seed and fertiliser and then takes payment from the resulting crop when delivered or collected (see www.cd3wd.com/sfmss/ and also refer to the WFP’s Purchase for Progress (P4P) System).

- Frivolous services such as sms radio program voting and tv voting. These could be charged as premium services.

- Private sector and public sector companies can get automated feedback from travelling and remote workers on task progress and/or vehicle progress and/or cross-border progress by structured sms converted into computer message which then feeds into a monitoring, MIS and reporting application

- Utilities such as electricity and water can set up a simple service to allow residents to query load-shedding estimated reconnection time, or whether there is in fact a fault (a simpler alternative would of course be announcements on national radio, similar to traffic and weather reports)

- Retail and wholesale suppliers of items such as bottled gas (LPG) can utilise the system to indicate whether or not they currently have stock and of course what is their current price

- The classified adverts system as above can even be used for the buying and selling of agricultural produce.

- An investment required vs. Investment offered system

- Loans or grants required vs. Loans or grants offered, microfinance/donor assisted or purely private

- A volunteer required vs. Volunteer offered system

- Technical advice wanted and offered

- Foreign exchange (forex) trading (where legal)

Such systems can save a lot of man-hours, a lot of vehicle kilometres, a lot of downtime, and can result in lower prices to consumers and to business and in better prices for producers. Moreover efficient retailers and wholesalers will be rewarded and inefficient will be punished.

Any operator who has a 24x7 PC or Server with connectivity sitting there can buy off-the-shelf software or have special software written which will enable him or her to offer services to consumers and to business throughout Zimbabwe. Such an operator can even have his or her application hosted on someone else’s server(s) and does not need to incur any hardware investment costs.

Once the sms gateway is in place, the other systems (IDSs) will spring up.

It is very important that everything should be economic – therefore ideally the sms gateway is free at the start. Since the cost of sms tends towards zero, if the MPP’s (econet, netone and telecel) can voluntarily or by government persuasion/regulation provide free incoming and outgoing sms messages to and from the gateway, then the whole game becomes feasible. The potential economic and commercial spinoff effect is very exciting and very high, and therefore it is possible that a market-oriented donor (USAID?) might be interested in funding and/or in guaranteeing such a project. Moreover, such a project has very interesting application throughout Africa and throughout the Third World. Operators such as Zain (formerly Celtel) who are looking towards Africa or regions of Africa as economic units, might be persuaded to participate at a later (international) stage of the Project. An Afterthought – the cost of an sms is not too serious for most (but not all) citizens – therefore an economic model where the initial sms is chargeable at normal rates but the response sms is free (absorbed by the sms gateway operator) should be quite acceptable – thus if the sms gateway operator is a MNP (mobile network provider) then they will get increased sms activity, of which the incoming sms’s generate normal revenue, and the outgoing sms’s (which will be probably equal in number to the incoming) will have to be absorbed and essentially given for free. A problem may arise if and when one MNP is running such an Sms Gateway and the other operating MNP’s within the same country insist on levying transfer charges for response sms’s to their customers; such transfer charges may result in an overall negative financial balance for the MNP which is operating the Sms Gateway...

Possible technical scenario(s):

One way to run the system is that only one (long) sms number is used – for example – 0912 800 800. The first field in the sms designates the destination email address for the sms, and the rest of the sms message appears as the email body (i.e. with no subject line); alternatively, the first field can refer to an email address lookup in the sms gateway system (e.g. hotdating can correspond to process@datingservices.co.zw, zoladverts can correspond to adverts@zol.co.zw, etc). Such a system (without the lookup facility) will in fact enable any and every operator to get into the action with no maintenance or registration activity required on the part of the sms gateway operator (i.e. very low or zero labour cost); the downside of course would be lack of regulation, but this could be gotten around by having a daily report of all email addresses and volumes sent (by email of course) to the relevant government ministry (the actual contents of each incoming and outgoing sms could also be sent to the ministry). There would of course automatically be a foul language filter, and anything caught in that would also be reported to the authorities.

A sample sms might read:

adverts@herald.co.zw * place * 175 * Instant Cash loans to all tel 794 198 , 023 273 210 , Harare

In this case, the 175 refers to the advertising category (money).... There are 3 fields only – the email destination, the category, and the advert itself... ‘place’ or ‘advertise’ or ‘submit’ might be used as the keyword....

A corresponding search might read:

adverts@herald.co.zw * search * 175 * loans Harare

or even

adverts@herald.co.zw * search * * loans Harare

adverts@herald.co.zw * search * * loans

if the searcher did not know the category, the search could still proceed and would produce the same results. Each system would have its own internal logic and its own requirements for how the sms’s are to be structured....

The simplest scenario is that the sms gateway converts structured sms’s to outgoing emails and also converts incoming emails to sms’s; there are several alternatives (refer to www.clickatell.com or www.smscountry.com for detail), which include sending a URL/URI with parameters to a web server and getting a response which can then be processed into a corresponding reply sms. If the service is to be free or low cost then probably one protocol only should be offered. The email option actually enables manually-driven services to operate, which may make sense under some circumstances. Very small or informal operators may choose to operate a purely manual service, at least at the start – to determine whether there is enough activity and profit to justify an automatic system...

The software necessary for automated IDSs can also be offered as a template or skeleton program, so that the basic work of creating the necessary software is done, and the additional work is quicker, simpler and therefore cheaper. In fact ideally a generic system can be built where the ‘programming’ work is in fact only setting up some parameters and values in database tables.... Then the cost of creating an IDS would be zero – only for the operator/designer to spend some time putting values into the tables in the generic IDS software system.

Regulation:

Possibly, each and every operator could be limited in the number of (free) sms’s which are processed per day and per month by the system. Certainly reporting should indicate to the sms gateway operator when any system operator is approaching such a limit, and negotiations for charging can be opened.

Most systems which are set up to operate through the sms gateway will almost certainly also have a conventional pc/smartphone web interface; but some may decide not to on purely system development cost grounds...

A charging mechanism should be in place for all system operators (except that initially the charge will be zero). If charging is switched on, then each operator will get an automatic daily email statement of monies charged.

Mr Alex Weir, 11 October 2008

4 Brechin Drive, Marlborough, Harare. www.cd3wd.com/contactus/

Postscript 23 October 2008

Since conceptualising the above, the following have become more apparent:

- Such sms-based IDS systems are extremely valid for kick-starting production, trade and economic activity throughout the third world, and not only in Zimbabwe

- A well designed highly generic classified adverts system could enable a large variety of activities to operate within it without any system modification

- One single global hosting of such a highly generic classified adverts system could feed placement and query activity from 80 or even 200 countries

- But such a system would ideally need one (or more) Sms Gateway in each country; if for any reason not possible, then the first of 2 alternatives would be: the consumer pays an international sms charge to send to one global sms gateway (typically based in India or a similar low-cost area) and the national MNP’s absorb the cost of the response sms, and the global sms gateway is somehow funded by an international donor; the other alternative is similar, but the customer’s outgoing international sms is charged at domestic rate. Note that international sms’s are typically charged at 2x domestic sms’s.

- I am in the process (2008/10) of setting up such a global well-designed highly generic classified adverts system with a sms-gateway interface. I am doing this before having lined up the necessary MNP’s and sms-gateway services – in the hope that demonstrating the back end of the system to prospective MNP’s will galvanise them into action. A conventional web interface will probably follow for use by prospective donors and by corporate and business customers.

There are several ways such a system can operate:

- For sale items are placed in the database and people who wish to buy items do searches. These searches are temporary only and do not stay in the database

- On the other side, people who want items place their requirement in the database and people who wish to sell or provide do searches. Again these searches are temporary only and do not stay in the database

- In one scenario, searches can be stored and can be instructed to repeat and deliver matches to the searcher if and when matches appear in the system – i.e. there is periodic automatic routining of each record against all the other records. The drawback of this system is who pays for the outgoing sms’s which result? If the user is a PC-based user then of course automatic email can be sent off, which is cost-free...

- In reality, the temporary searches referred to above should not be deleted but should almost certainly be stored by the system, so that the system operator or owner can tell how much activity is taking place and how many matches are occurring in various categories. This information can be used to make the system better by targeted advertising and/or urging certain groups to place their stock or requirements on the system

- Many items being offered or sought have only a fixed shelf life – typically 3 days; and when an item is sold out it is better for the seller to delete from the system to avoid unnecessary enquiries. If the seller has not already deleted the row when its designated shelf-life occurs then the system deletes the row (in fact by using a trigger the row is stored in an archive table for MIS – Management Information System – analysis).

- Because an sms has a limited length, then there may well be many searches which produce too much output to be stored on one sms – in such a case the response may be a numbered list of the database entries which match (this could be say 25 rows, each with a 6-digit row number and a 1-character separator (probably a comma); a better response is probably the 2 or 3 first matches plus an indicator of how many matches in total were there. If there are a lot of matches then the searcher may well decide to make the effort to switch to using a PC to make the search. Probably also the sequence of returning rows will have to be randomised so that every advert gets an equal chance over time to be returned to sms-based searchers. This can be achieved by dedicating one database column to a random rumber, which a stored procedure keeps on changing or each row in the system; then each return is sequenced on that column.

Mr Alex Weir, 22 October 2008

Appendix – FAQ’s

Q. What is an SMS Gateway?

A. It is a means of translating an incoming sms message from a mobile phone into some kind of computer signal which can be processed by a computer software system to achieve some purpose. It also can (and usually is) used to process an incoming computer message into an sms message which can be sent to a mobile phone.

Q. What form(s) can these Sms Gateways take?

A. It can be a computer (e.g. a conventional intel or amd-based pc or server) which is fitted with a special gsm modem card and typically loaded with 4 sim cards for each modem cards. These sim cards can be prepaid or contract line. A popular software for this is at www.kannel.org, which incidentally runs under the Linux operating system. Alternatively, an SMS gateway can be run by a Mobile Network Provider (MNP) or even by an Independent Operator. www.clickatell.com (based in South Africa) are one such independent operator, also www.smscountry.com (based in India).

Q. What can the existence of a Sms Gateway service in Zimbabwe achieve?

A. It can open the market to a wide variety of services, which previously had been restricted to people with ownership of or access to a PC, or a high-end mobile phone (with GPRS and web browser).

Q. Why would an sms gateway run by a Zimbabwean MNP (mobile network provider) be advantageous?

A. It could keep costs down to a very low level

Q. Which Zimbabwean MNP would be the best?

A. Econet are the only MNP which currently provide consumer data services; therefore they would have a strong advantage over NetOne and Telecel.