
Show HN: SMS-Scope – test receipt of sms in multiple countries - nbrempel
https://sms-scope.com/
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nbrempel
SMS-Scope is a tool I built over the weekend to satisfy a need of mine. I work
on a system that needs to successfully send SMS notifications to multiple
different countries.

I intend on using this tool to verify receipt of messages in other countries
as well as to verify that the system can convert between human-readable number
formats and the e.164 standard (and still successfully send the message).

~~~
detaro
Interesting. What's powering it? Do you have phones in those countries, are
you using a service like twilio, ...?

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nbrempel
I'm just using Twilio right now. I was surprised a tool like this didn't
already exist (that I could find).

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detaro
I don't know much about how the phone network works, but my worry would be
that you mostly check if your system accepts the country prefix and then how
well your SMS provider is connected to Twilio. Is there a meaningful
difference in deliverability there/would having numbers from the actual local
providers make a difference?

~~~
nbrempel
As far as I know, Twilio doesn't distinguish between SMS messages coming from
within Twilio and those sent from other networks.

If that's true, all messages would still need to go out and traverse the SMS
network and leave Twilio's infrastructure before landing on the other side.

I think this should provide reliable insights into message success/failure at
the network level. It wouldn't show any localized issues like if a cell tower
is down, though.

All that being said, I haven't done any serious research into how SMS are sent
and what the network looks like. Would be an interesting thing to look into!

