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Update: After reports from a number of our customers we decided that the best option is to be able to set the character set and data coding scheme separately. In the next version of Diafaan SMS Server it is possible to set the character set to 'GSMDefaultAlphabet', 'ISO_8851_1', 'ISO_8851_15' and 'GSMDefaultAlphabet_7BitsPacked' and the DCS to any value between 0 and 255.

This should make sure that the data coding is compatible to (almost) all SMPP servers, although I would not be surprised if there are some SMPP servers that use yet another character set.

Regards, Henk

The SMPP specification is very vague about the Data Coding Scheme (DCS) that the SMPP service provider should support and as a result of this, different service providers handle the data coding scheme and optimum character set differently. This means that you might have to try out different settings to see what works for your SMPP connection. It also means that some characters will not be properly handled by some SMPP providers (or by Diafaan SMS Server, from the SMPP service provider's point of view).

Diafaan SMS Server uses the GSM default alphabet and character encoding (plus extension characters) in combination with DCS 0 by default. If your SMPP Service provider supports this as well, all characters from the SMS default alphabet should be received properly on the mobile phone, including the €, the @ and the £ characters. However, I have made tests with an SMPP service provider that, unnecessarily, converts the ¡ character to @ to 'help' customers send the @ character in an easier way.

Diafaan SMS Server also uses the SMS default alphabet and character encoding when you choose 'IA5' in the 'CharacterSetSend' property (DCS 1) but strictly speaking this is the wrong character encoding for DCS 1 since the official IA5 encoding only contains the basic ASCII characters.

When you choose 'ISO_8859_1' (DCS 3) as the 'CharacterSetSend' setting, and your SMPP server supports this, most of the characters should be sent properly but since the € character is not in the official iso-8859-1 character set, it is probably changed to a question mark. The same is true for a number of Greek characters that are in the SMS default alphabet.

Unfortunately, there are many other DCS/character set combinations that the SMPP service provider might consider the right choice. If you can provide us with information about the character set and DCS values that works best with your SMPP service provider we will try our best to implement this in future versions of Diafaan SMS Server. Please be as specific as possible, just sending an report that the @ does not display properly is usually not sufficient for us to figure out the optimal solution for your SMPP provider.

Regards, Henk