Question : Methodology & best practise for GPRS data transmission/reception

Hello All,

quick question relating to the best practise for an application I'm tinkering with.  i'm not experienced with GPRS/WAP or WML but I have a few ideas and I need to establish whether I'm barking up the right tree here.

The basic application will be a remote GSM/GPRS modem device (which may additionally have GPS on there) which will periodically (approx every 10 minutes) return a small amount of data to a central location (probably just temperature information and an ID - maybe additionally GPS info  as described before). I'll be using GPRS as SMS would be too expensive.

I've been experimenting with a GPRS phone (Nokia 6310i) and this is limiting me to the http protocol as this is all that is supported by this phone over GPRS, so I have been playing around with our server to make it support WAP, created an asp page and used a 'get' string (like "http://myserver.com/wap-process.asp?name=Fred&ID=14&colour=blue") to update data on my sql server.  So far so good.

Due to my limited experience in the field, the above example is the only real way I can think of transferring the data across.  Now I know it will depend on the capabilities of the GSM/GPRS modem we end up using and there may well be other protocols available to me, but I can't realistically think of many other useful ways of achieving this data transfer, for example, I'm hardly going to ftp it across, am I! (or am I? :o))

My question is really, is this the best way of going about doing this? Bearing in mind that there could eventually be thousands, even tens of thousands of these small modem devices out there transmitting their information back to our web server every 10 minutes (it should only ever be a few hundred bytes at a time), is there any better way of doing this?

Like I say, there may well be a standard way of doing this... I've only ever really dealt with SMS before and that's a whole new kettle of fish anyway.  I also want to be able to identify the incoming mobile number when the asp page is called over wap, but I would guess this is not going to be easily accessible and I would be far better off programming this into the sending logic on the gprs modem device as part of the transmission string, right?

I've allocated reasonably high points to this question to make it attractive to some experts in the field - I'd like to think I'll end up allocating the points to someone who can give me a reasoned discussion on this, rather than a, "yeah dude, that's sorta right" kind of answer!

Answer : Methodology & best practise for GPRS data transmission/reception

You were totally right. (Operator firewall issues aside) Sorry everyone about the repeated display of my previous message - it's not me resending, but some kind of ExpExch server bug. Something for another expert question? :-)