Re: GSM 03.38 packed data in SMPP messages

Hi

We have come across such a beast, and decided that it was indeed non 
standard and not conforming. We did make a patch for this unamed provider - 
but we dont use them anymore so I dumped the patches. But yes basically we 
just pulled the code from the AT module

Nisan
  - At 11:39 PM 2003/12/26, Benjamin Lee wrote:

>I, also, haven't come across any SMSC's using packed GSM03.38 encoding,
>only 7 bit GSM03.38 transported in 8 bit octets.
>
>http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00099.html
>
>On Friday, 2003-12-26 at 10:40:39 PM, Ian Cass scribbled:
> > Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote:
> >
> > > The SMPP SMSC made by ZTE (http://www.zte.com.cn) apparently sends and
> > > expects to receive GSM SMS text packed in that way, oddly enough. Does
> > > SMPP 3.3/3.4 say that it should be received unpacked or packed?  Don't
> > > have the specs on hand...
> >
> > Well, section 4.4 submit_sm says that a short_message is field type Octet
> > String. Section 2.11 defines this as "Octet String A series of octets, not
> > necessarily NULL terminated". 7bit characters are not octets, they are
> > septets. However, you could argue that by packing them, you are 
> transferring
> > them as octets thereby fulfilling the spec.
> >
> > Having said that, SMPP does not define any method to tell you that the data
> > is in fact packed. Section 5.2.19 data_coding *is not* the GSM DCS field
> > even though most SMSC's use it as such. SMPP uses data_coding merely as a
> > character set indicator & breaks other functions of GSM03.38 DCS out into
> > other fields. SMPP data_coding does not allow for indication of packed data
> > & there is no other field available to indicate that the data is 
> packed. Are
> > ZTE treating the data_coding field as GSM DCS & setting the packing bit?
> >
> > Strictly speaking, packed text is not allowed in SMPP. I don't know of any
> > other SMPP SMSC that does this by default.
> >
> > --
> > Ian Cass
> >
>
>--
>Benjamin Lee
>Melbourne, Australia         "Always real."    http://www.realthought.net/
>
>__________________________________________________________________________
>I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in
>my body.  Then I realized who was telling me this.
>                 -- Emo Phillips