Emergency SMS Messages for Vehicle Accidents: A Fastsms API Case Study

About a year ago we were approached by a young man looking to use an SMS service in his university project. At the time, Thomas West was a student at the University of West England studying Computer Systems Integration.

When it came time to work on his project, he used Google to find a SMS provider and discovered fastsms. After more researching, he chose fastsms because the price was very competitive and the SMS API documentation seemed easy to use.

He’s now received a first class degree and found the time to answer some questions for us about how he used the fastsms SMS API in his successful project.

FS: What was your project about?

TW: My project was based around introducing new safety and security measures in vehicles, potentially as a standard, with the aim of introducing a non-biased insurance rating system by measuring the driving performance of a vehicle.

A tracker like device was placed in the vehicle that would use 3G technology to communicate performance information to a server. This server would then analyse this data and if it believes an accident has occurred, the fastsms service was used to communicate this to a next of kin and could be extended to the emergency services and CCTV centres.

FS: What specific challenges were you trying to demonstrate in your project? 

TW: I had to alert a next of kin or “emergency” contact with information regarding where an accident may have occurred. This included a link to point to a dynamically created web page.

FS: How did you implement the fastsms API to meet these challenges?

TW: I thought it would be quite easy. I implemented the SMS API by building a custom framework for building and making requests wrapped with error checking. It is constructed in C# and was used in an ASP.Net MVC application.

Everything was quite self-explanatory, so it was easy to follow and implement. As the way the requests are built are completely uniform and there is an easy to follow structure for checking the result of a request.

FS: Were your expectations of fastsms met or exceeded during your project?  

TW: The messages were received much quicker than I had anticipated and were almost instant. If there was a problem with the request, one of a large number of error codes was provided to make it easy to identify the problem.

The free credits they donated allowed me to build my framework cost-free. Being a student, fastsms were able to offer me a cut-price VMN to aid in my project. Sadly, I was unable to include this due to time constraints with the rest of the project. The fastsms service met all of the needs for this project.

FS: Beyond the API and message delivery, is there anything you want to mention about fastsms?

TW: I did have one issue for which I required support and fastsms were able to rectify this, literally immediately. I have already suggested a friend of mine use them for sending SMS alerts to clients and wouldn’t even look elsewhere if I needed this functionality again.

FS: Thank you!

We want to thank Thomas for taking the time to share his experiences with our service and congratulate him on his first class degree. If you’re interested in learning more about his project you can find him on LinkedIn. To see more detail of the API used for the project click here.