SMS - Devil of a time knowing where to start with sms

Read a lot online and am still confused.

I am a programmer and not afraid of doing it myself.

I have a website. I want clients to be able to use sms to blast to their customers that signed onto the site..much the way twitter is I guess.

I do not want to use some chinsy cheap sms gateway, I would rather go direct to smsc or to an industry/top notch sms gateway used by the wireless providers.

I am thinking I will have to program for each provider, but the whole sms thing online is 99% cheap gateway information and very little on a more professional commercial aspect.

Just do not have a good starting point.

1) contact each provider individually?
2) there is some gateway(s) that is the 'big' one to connect too?
3) the only way is to use a chinsy gateway? (refuse to do this)

2 way...I send, they can send to me...

just as confused as when I started researching this....wheeeee

This page will probably help:
http://www.developershome.com/sms/

This software may help as well:
http://www.kannel.org/index.shtml

Note that a direct connection to an SMSC is going to be very very expensive. You have to contact an SMSC owner and negotiate a contract with them. You will probably have to prepay for XXXXX+ messages per month at a rate of at least a couple cents per message. You're probably looking at a minimum commitment of $2000-$4000 per month. Obviously the more you prepay for the cheaper the rate will be. The SMSC owner will provide you with connection and protocol details (it differs from SMSC to SMSC).

Companies that are big enough to afford them do so, other people use cheap gateways. That's how the market works.

yea, beginning to realize I would have no other choice...

well, almost no other choice.
It is actually free to send text messages to a phone (and receive text back to the server) by simply knowing the '@' usage
ex.. 9545551212@metropcs.com works in the 'to' section and goes right to the phone...and reply sends back to the mail server.

might be the way to go.

Wonder how twitter does it?

Twitter is a large company (wiki says $150M in revenue and 300 employees). With $150M in revenue I have absolutely no doubt that they can afford a direct link to an SMSC.