My phone carrier gives me a use-it-or-lose-it monthly allowance of 1000 #SMS txts within #Belgium. I only use ~50 or so. Any ideas on how I can use them and be less wasteful?

I’m not really looking for a big project. Just numbers that give free services. E.g. there are probably numbers I can SMS and get back the weather. Or even better, I would love to be able to SMS a Belgian phone number that would forward my SMS to an international number. Not sure if gateways like that exist.

If I were looking for a project, I could probably sell a SMS service. So for example I could proxy SMS messages for people outside of Belgium for a fee. It would be interesting but more effort than I want.

#askFedi

  • activistPnkOP
    1·
    11 months ago

    Considering how unreliable SMS is, I wonder if it would be useful to have some machinery on the user side of things to test the reliability. E.g.

    • Send an SMS every 6 hours containing a random number to a service that forwards the SMS back to you so you can keep stats on the rate of loss.
    • Perhaps every real-world SMS you send to friends should be sent twice, and the receiving side has some way of auto deleting dupes. This would increase your reliability. Although the overall network reliability might drop if everyone does this because the traffic load would double.