SMPP vs. HTTP

[Shahzad_Ismail]

Question

What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of the SMPP and HTTP Protocols?

Answer

Both these protocols have their respective advantages and disadvantages:

HTTP	Advantages:	Easy to implement, widely supported on a variety of platforms.
	Disadvantages:	Limited throughput and “expensive” to add capacity, not specific to messaging, extra overhead in protocol.
SMPP	Advantages:	High throughput, works well with “bursty” campaigns, scales up better than HTTP.
	Disadvantages:	More difficult to implement.

The decision to use one or the other really comes down to the customer’s ability to develop the API as well as the expected campaign type. Large blasts or urgent alerts are best provisioned on SMPP accounts, while information on demand, activation code delivery or MO-originated queries work well on HTTP.

Digital Interconnect offers an API for both:

• Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP) - refer to the SMPP Interface Specification
• Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) - refer to the HTTP Interface Specification.