Messaging system that works on older text phones, PCs, in addition to feature and smart phones

[geoffrey mendelson]

On 10/10/2013 7:12 AM, Steve G. wrote:
>
> I want to reach two levels of people - community health workers (CHW), 
> and the people who receive their services. So there are two 'target 
> audiences'. I can possibly provide CHW's with feature phones, but not 
> expensive smart phones. Regular people will only, or mostly, have text 
> phones, not smart phones. So I need a program that can send messages 
> to groups of 10-200, on text only cell phones.
>

The problem is access and price. Smart phones have Wifi, which makes 
sending messages to the relatively free (as in cost). You just need to 
provide them with Wifi. ALL GSM phones have SMS (short message service), 
the question is the price of sending a message.

Here in Israel you can get an unlimited SMS package for relatively 
money. Unlimited is of course a misnomer, it's really "virtually 
unlimited", or in plain English more than an average adult can send. My 
guess is that it is 3,000
SMS's a month for most carriers, or about 100 SMS's a day. YMMV.

In that case, the best answer to me is to use a USB modem dongle. There 
were several solutions discussed over the last few days, my preference 
is for asterisk.
>
> If there isn't such a program (that works on PCs, smart phones, 
> feature phones, text phones), how do I go about using one of the 
> current open source projects to get it adapted? Is it even possible?
>
It's not open source, and in fact it is now owned by Microsoft, but 
SKYPE is supported on almost everything, and most people already use it. 
However that requires a smartphone or tablet and either a cellular data 
plan or wifi.

Back when I was blogging, I posted a suggestion for this type of system, 
I'll see if I can find the post and send it to you.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson 4X1GM/N3OWJ
Jerusalem Israel.