Hi all,

I missed this discussion earlier not sure how.

I am actually the architect and developer of the Safaricom MPESA IPN. It currently hosts over 200 paybill numbers and is fairly stable. @Haggai, the IPN is actually more realtime THAN the modem (but other factors may apply e.g you maybe on internet link instead of a p2p). Also, modems process 1 sms for each 6 seconds or about that...lose network, fill sim card (auto deleting doesnt always work in my experience).

@Pederson, the issue of character was resolved a while back, if you are still experiencing it i suggest you contact safaricom ipn support.

IPN tries to submit transactions several times so the advise that you check for duplicates is a good one.

If you have specific technical challenges with using IPN holla offlist and i maybe able to help you or direct you to relevant support at safaricom.


Regards

Bernard Kioko
Bernsoft





On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 3:56 AM, Haggai Nyang <haggai.nyang@gmail.com> wrote:
The advantage the paybill SIM has over the IPN method is that the transaction is 'true' realtime i.e. the moment the sender has received the MPESA text, your modem has also received a copy. The downside is scalability - I wonder how many transactions you can pull with such a device over time. I've used the SIM with a Cinterion modem (reading with Perl) and it was working fine but has issues with concatenated texts where a transaction takes 2 mem slots. Other issues to consider include stability of the modem...Cinterion is a good brand but once or twice it has hanged on me thus having to log in to MPESA and manually make entries...and run to the remote site for a cold reboot...you get the drift. If you push many transactions a day you definitely don't want this.

The IPN avenue is the best IMO - once you've ironed out the duplicate messages it's fine. Messages hit your db in ~5 min after the sender receives the MPESA text. Another problem (for some transactions) is that you'll run into the 160-char limit they impose on the IPN texts - so if you want to parse the text to know your utility balance it can be a PITA. I don't really understand why they do this. With some code that reads over the previous entries in the db to intelligently reconstruct the balances, that shouldn't be much of a hassle.

My wish is that they implement JSON responses :)

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