Sinch Community

General Data Protection Regulation is a new set of regulations in force from the 25th May 2018. These rules have been created to strengthen and protect the personal data of European Union (EU) data subjects and are designed to cover the rights of EU residents and citizens in terms of privacy, the protection of personal data, security of that data, and consumer consent in a world of increasing data flow between businesses and consumers across the world.

Gateway GPRS Support Node - part of the GSM infrastructure, the GGSN is responsible for the interoperation between the GPRS network and external packet switched networks.

Global Messaging Services (formerly called GMSU) (https://gms-worldwide.com/).

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a mobile data service available to users of GSM. It’s a legacy data technology that became available when 2.5G networks were rolled out. It’s the slowest form of IP connectivity that a phone can get at max 80 kbps (or about 7 mins to download one song),

A grey route is a route used for sending SMS where the destination operator (on which the subscriber you are sending messages to is connected) does not get paid for the message. A grey route takes advantage of a legacy ‘sender keeps all’ policy in the GSM commercial framework, and although it is not regarded as fraudulent, it is frowned upon because it tends to be less reliable and is subject to immediate blocking by the destination operator.

Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) is a digital mobile telephony system which is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world. GSM uses a variation of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) to digitize and compress data, then send it. GSM operates at a frequency band of 850, 900, 1800 or 1900 MHz depending on the country/region.

According to the GSM specification, a standard SMS message can contain up to 140 bytes of data (payload). Standard Latin (ISO-8859-1) character encoding represents a single character using 1 byte, which is 8 bits. Therefore, the maximum number of Latin 1 characters that could be included in an SMS is 140. GSM encoding represents characters using 7 bits instead of 8. This therefore provides a maximum of 160 characters per SMS. (140 * 8 bits) / 7 bits = 160 This effectively halves the number of characters the GSM character set can support, compared to ISO-8859-1. In order to include common characters that are usually represented using the 8th bit, these characters as well as other symbol characters must be re-mapped to a combination of lower bits. These re-mapped characters are often referred to as special characters. This re-mapping, in combination with packing 7-bit characters into 8-bit bytes is called GSM encoding.

Gateway, a connection that bridges between two different networks.

A home network is the network that a subscriber has a contract with for their wireless service. For example, someone with an AT&T contract would say AT&T is their home network. A home network can typically be changed through the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) process which is available in most countries and allows a subscriber to take their phone number to a new network. For example, an AT&T subscriber could port their number from AT&T to Verizon at which point Verizon would become their home network.