See amount of SMS or SMS history for billing

[chrispopp]

How do you count how many SMS have been sent? Is there a SOAP option? Or a counter?

[Vodia PBX]

Right now we don't have stats for that. There might be some information on your SMS provider side.

[Enzo Matrix]

Hey there, is this something that you are currently looking at?

[Enzo Matrix]

I am using Twilio for SMS, would it be possible to add some sort of a tag to the message API that could be shown in the Twilio dashboard to identify which account/domain sent the SMS?

We are going to have to turn off the SMS feature until we have some way of identifying the sender (in Multi Tenant) so that we can bill the customer correctly.

Cheers.

[Vodia PBX]

Is there a way to add a tag to the Twilio API call? Then adding a tag, e.g. the domain name would be very simple.

[Enzo Matrix]

I have just had a look through the Twilio SMS API and it doesn't look like you can

I notice on the Domain DID screen there is a 'SMS DID' in Vodia, is it possible to use that?  For example, we could register a separate mobile DID in Twilio for each domain, then when the message is sent, are you able to change the API so it sends the SMS API in the 'from' field of the Twilio API?  Then, in Twilio, I would be able to see SMS's, and filter by the from number.

If this can't be done, what is the 'SMS DID' in domain settings used for?

Message Resource Reference for the Twilio Messaging REST API - Twilio

from Required if messagingServiceSid is not passed

POST PHONE_NUMBER PII MTL: 120 DAYS   A Twilio phone number in E.164 format, an alphanumeric sender ID, or a Channel Endpoint address that is enabled for the type of message you want to send. Phone numbers or short codes purchased from Twilio also work here. You cannot, for example, spoof messages from a private cell phone number. If you are using messaging_service_sid, this parameter must be empty.

[Vodia PBX]

Yes you can use a separate DID for each domain (in the latest build you can even use a separate provider for each domain, which also means that you can use separate credentials). That will naturally separate accounts a little bit.

[Enzo Matrix]

That's great, thanks!

Also, I have tested alpha-numeric SMS ANI's which works great, except for the fact that the sender-id is being received by Twilio in all lower case, for example I have the SMS ANI of 'MyAccount' however Twilio is receiving it from Vodia as 'myaccount' - with no capitals.

Any where I can change this quickly locally - it is supported by Twilio as I tried it using a generic API

Thanks.

[Vodia PBX]

Hmm I guess this is because it all comes from email addresses, which is what SIP addresses practically are, which the PBX uses for phone numbers as well. Are you able to control what Twilio assigns as numbers? Then the answer would be to use only lower case for now.

[Enzo Matrix]

The Twilio API accepts whatever Vodia is sending in the From part of the message:

["from" => "noreply", "body" => "And again"]

However, when I am saving the SMS ANI, I am entering it as NoReply not noreply - so Vodia is either saving it in the database as all lowercase, or it is being converted to lowercase in the Vodia platform somewhere as Twilio is receiving it in lowercase.

Is it possible for me to have a look at the code on the PBX for the SMS functionality and see if I can debug it myself? I had a look at the file structure but couldn't find where the Twilio integration is on my server.

Thanks.

[Vodia PBX]

The PBX considers this a user (or admin) phone number input field and applies the reformatting magic to it. This means that 617-399-8147 becomes (if the country code is 1) +16173998147. For alphanumeric input, the PBX does process it like a email/SIP user name, which is case insensitive and because of that gets transformed into the canonical lower-case format. I believe that generally makes sense because SMS sender addresses are phone numbers. 

Does the receiver of the SMS even see the number anywhere? If not and this is just for accounting purposes, a pragmatic approach could be just to keep it lowercase or even give it virtual phone numbers. 

[Enzo Matrix]

Thanks for your response.

No the receiver does not see the phone number of the sender.  Alpha-numeric sender IDs are quite common in most countries What is an Alphanumeric Sender ID? - Twilio

Due to note being able to provide any accounting to the number of SMS's sent through Vodia, if a customer of ours wants two-way SMS, then they pay us for a dedicated Twilio SMS DID, that's how we know the billing for IN/OUT SMS's, by using their unique number.

If they don't want two-way and OUT only, then we want to use Alpha-numeric, so the receiver can't respond to the message, and we can also see the alpha-numeric caller ID in Twilio so we can bill for it.

 

[Enzo Matrix]

Any Update on this one?

[Vodia PBX]

Not really. The workaround for now is to create a SMS account for each domain and then have the billing from the SMS provider. We are a little hesitant with changes in this area because there are more topics coming up which essentially need the same kind of flexibility like for regular DID and we first need a clear understanding on how to properly address this in a bigger picture.

[SeanKann]

Any update on this? Looking for some type of solution for the billing aspect of SMS messages.

Can't you just add it to the regular CDR and add an option type sms?

I export the data to MySQL then I can just run a query to count where type = SMS

For us, it doesn't have to include what was sent. Just that it was an SMS or MMS message, extension, direction, local part and remote party. I think that would solve a lot of issues for everyone

 

[Vodia PBX]

We still don't have usage data for SMS. How are you billing for call minutes? Are you using the rate tables? Would this be a way to add it to the bill?