Glossary
Comprehensive glossary of mobile industry terminology
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Application to Person SMS (A2P SMS) is a term used to describe an SMS message sent from a software application (run by an enterprise or business) to a person’s phone. Examples of A2P SMS messages are: receiving a text message with your account balance from your bank, or an appointment reminder from your doctor. Typically, this is a one-way only (traffic to the subscriber from the business); however, it can go both ways, if the “campaign’ or messaging program allows interactive responses from the mobile subscriber.
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Application to Person. A protocol that is used to facilitate the confirmation of a wireless subscriber’s intent to purchase multimedia from a VASP.
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Account refers to your business account with Sinch. Accessing your account enables you to add and remove products and services, review current charges and credit availability, access web tools, review online reports and more.
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Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is a system to handle large inbound call volumes. ACD automatically disperses calls to the specific group responsible for answering.
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Answered Call Event (ACE) is when a call is answered.
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An acknowledgement is a confirmation received from the handset or SMSC. Conversely a notification is a confirmation used within the Hub when messages are sent to a customer.
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Percentage of respondents who opted in to participate in a mobile initiative/campaign. Acquisition rate = total participants/total audience.
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An advertisement impression transpires each time a consumer is exposed to an advertisement (either prepended or appended to an SMS message, on mobile web or web page, within a video clip, or related media).
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A process whereby a Content Provider provides financial consideration to one or more persons or entities in exchange for their agreement to offer Content Providers’ products and/or services to users.
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An SMS aggregator is a company that supports sending a mobile message (SMS or MMS etc.) to any person, anywhere in the world, using a single connection possible. SMS aggregators typically buy from multiple MNOs around the world to ensure they can achieve global reach and because of their scale, they typically qualify for bulk discounts. The ability to “send” a message is sold to enterprises and small to medium businesses who then benefit from this simplicity and affordability. The value an SMS aggregator provides is making it easier and cheaper for enterprises to deliver a message anywhere in the world, without having to integrate technically or negotiate commercially with multiple suppliers.
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Notifications, typically in the form of a text or multimedia message, containing time-sensitive information (event details, weather, news, services updates) that are pushed to a mobile subscriber who has opted-in to receive this information. Note: If the mobile subscriber has not opted in to receive said information, the notification would be considered SPAM.
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2 codes: A two letter code or three letter combination that identifies a country or region for example AUS is Australia, US is United States and FR is France.
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Can be up to 11 characters. It can be letter or other characters such as the underscore and is therefore not a dialable number. It allows you to use the company name or brand as the sender ID for one-way messages.
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An Application Programming Interface (API) enables developers to add functionality (such as sending an SMS) to their app that would be difficult to program themselves.  APIs consist of a group of methods and operations that can be accessed through endpoints, URLs that can be plugged into an application's code to send and receive information.   An example is the Sinch SMS API. It contains endpoints that enable applications to send and receive SMS messages.  Imagine that you want to build an appointment reminder or marketing app. An application like this needs the ability to send SMS messages at scheduled times. To do this, your app simply sends a Post request to the SMS send endpoint . This tells Sinch the message you want to send, the numbers you want to send it to, and when you want it to be sent. Our servers handle the rest, making your development easier, faster and more productive.   Endpoints can be a pain to use directly so many developers use APIs in the guise of an SDK.  In the case of the above example, let's say your app is written in Python. Instead of calling the SMS API send endpoint directly, it can call the send method of our Python SDK.   One of the most popular type of APIs is the REST API. This sends and receives data in the popular JSON format. Sinch uses REST APIs to provide integrations with SMS , WhatsApp, RCS and voice calling.   APIs, particularly REST APIs are an effective development tool that allows developers at all levels to integrate advanced functionality into their applications. Check out some popular Sinch APIs. SMS WhatsApp RCS Email Numbers Verification Voice.   To enable developers to use them effectively, APIs are normally extensively documented. The state of the art in documentation standards is the Open API Specification (OAS). Sinch uses OAS 3.0 to provide consistent and comprehensive API documentation.  OAS files can also be imported into Postman to create Postman Collections. Postman is a convenient tool for testing APIs and is often used for QA purposes.   Authenticating APIs   APIs almost always require some form of authentication.  This can come in a number of types:   Basic Authentication is an HTTP authentication scheme that requires a username and password. These are normally sent in the request header. Basic Auth is mainly used for testing purposes. OAuth 2.0 requires a short lived access token. The short lifetime of the token makes it more secure than Basic Auth JWT authentication combines the simplicity of Basic Auth with the security of OAuth 2.0. Like Basic Auth, it requires a username and password, but then it adds an extra stage. The API provider generates an encrypted token with the user's credentials, that is sent back to the consumer in response. API users can then use this token in subsequent API requests to authenticate themselves. API Key Authentication requires an API key called a bearer token, which is typically sent in the request header. It's used in the SMS API.   The first two types of authentication are used in the Sinch Conversation API, which allows you to leverage a single API to send and receive messages over the most popular channels in the world.
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Any program or a group of programs that is designed for the end user. Application includes such things as database program, games, word processor, email etc.
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A framework of services. A foundation upon which applications are built, hosted, and run on.
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An Access Point Name (APN) is used for mobile devices to establish a data connection from the mobile network to a different network. It describes specific characteristics of the connection.
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AI is an area of computer science that gives technology the ability to seem like they have human intelligence. The technology is copying the human behaviour, such as learning and understanding.
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Application Service Provider. A business providing computer-based services to customers over a network. An example would be providing access to a particular software application (such as customer relationship management) using a standard protocol.
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Answer Seizure Ratio (ASR) is the percentage of answered telephone calls relative to the total number of calls.
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