Around the world, SMS - or Short Message Service - has become ubiquitous. Millions upon millions of SMSes are sent and received each day from one mobile phone to another. These 160-character messages are the way in which people around the globe or around the corner stay in touch with one another. Increasingly, however, people are realizing that they can make cheap telephone calls using SMS.

Using an SMS gateway, a cheap phone call can be triggered using SMS. An SMS triggered phone call to Jamaica, for example, would cost less than one U.S. dollar. Technology allows you to place a call between any two telephone handsets, while your mobile phone or computer keyboard becomes a convenient dial pad. Contrary to what you may imagine, a telephone call placed with an SMS gateway uses a reliable telephone network, so the quality of the call is high.

More than Telephone Calls

An SMS gateway can be used for more than a cheap phone call. There are a variety of SMS-based services that you can use.

Email to SMS: An email to SMS service allows you to send SMS through email. Some SMS gateways go a step further by allowing your business contacts, family members, and friends to send SMS to you.

SMS to Email: Almost all mobile services offer SMS to email. Some SMS gateways, however, allow two-way communication between email and SMS - without limiting communication to a short window of time.

SMS to SMS: With SMS to SMS communication, you can broadcast one SMS to one person or to many different people. The better SMS gateways allow for an SMS to be sent discretely, or allow an SMS to be sent to a set of predefined names that you provide.

Scheduling: Although simple SMS scheduling can be done with a mobile phone, SMS gateways use a Web interface to allow for more complex scheduling.

Fax Services

With the right SMS gateway, you can send faxes anywhere using email to fax. In addition, you can fax a web page to any fax machine using SMS. Furthermore, you can create a schedule so that you can regularly receive a fax of a particular web page.

Some SMS gateways charge for their services in hard currency; typically, you can use a credit card or a payment service like moneybookers. Other SMS gateways incorporate a credit system, and charge for services with credits. You can either purchase credits using a credit card or payment service, or you can earn credits by referring friends, family members, and business associates to the service. In essence, you receive a commission each time some you refer uses the services of the SMS gateway. If you choose to go that route, you can go from making cheap telephone calls using SMS to making free telephone calls using SMS. What could be better than that?