Any alternative options would be appreciated too. I saw Microcom’s iSMS modem mentioned in the list archives but it’s only 2G so likely won’t be viable much longer.
The other question, given the fact that they’re both GSM-based, is whether or not you know if AT&T or T-Mobile have cheap ‘machine’ plans for use by these types of devices. We have all of our OpenGear out of band console servers on Verizon and they have these special ‘machine’ plans for $10/mo with very limited bandwidth, so that has allowed us to deploy a bunch of them without worrying about a huge phone bill.
The other question, given the fact that they’re both GSM-based, is whether or not you know if AT&T or T-Mobile have cheap ‘machine’ plans for use by these types of devices.
AT&T and T-Mo both have cheap MVNOs (resellers.) Airvoice Wireless resells AT&T
and has a $10/mo plan, texts charged at 2c each with any extra rolling over to
the next month.
Tracfone has a variety of AT&T bring your own device plans, of which
one of the the cheapest is $18 every 90 days, including 180 texts, any extra
rolls over. If you need more than that, you can top up 1000 texts for
$10 at any time.
These are both SIM-only plans, put the SIM in whatever device you want.
There's lots of providers out there complete with api's. I found one in Canada with 1 cent per each sms to US and Canada and 3 cents each anywhere else. If you want a dedicated long code, that'll cost you $25.00 per month.
There are also services that do it for you. In my day job (Transit related software), we use textmarks.com to provide interactive transit information ("where's my bus" kinds of things) via interactive SMS. Not particularly expensive.
The problem with Internet-based services is that they depend on the very thing most of us are trying to monitor. For reliable SMS you need out-of-band text transmission at least, and ideally out-of-band TCP/IP data. So far cellular modems provide lots of options for the latter, but I've seen few universally-available choices for the former. I plan to check out the Verizon options mentioned here -- the last time I tried to talk to our business exec, they claimed there were no cheap options.
The specific phrase you’ll want to use with your VZ rep is a “machine to machine” plan. It’s the same type of plans alarm companies purchase for cell-backups. They have plans with data allowances as low as 1 MB/month for a few dollars, but you get destroyed if you go over the plan because the data rates are very high. If you just use them for emergency OOB ssh over cell they’re great and economical.
Thanks for those pointers. The "mega bill" problem is one I have to avoid. We used to use ISDN as backup to T1 circuits, but had to abandon that after some wayward fail-overs resulted in $5000 phone bills. I'll check the plan overage terms carefully!
Thanks for those pointers. The "mega bill" problem is one I have to avoid. We used to use ISDN as backup to T1 circuits,
but had to abandon that after some wayward fail-overs resulted in $5000 phone bills. I'll check the plan overage terms
carefully!
Sounds like an excellent application for a $10/mo prepaid plan on
something like Tracfone. If disaster strikes and you need a lot of
data one month, you can add extra credit directly from the phone.
1) You know that you can send sms messages via email to pretty much any cell phone.
2) Personal Preference, if I was doing so, I would do it with a small mikrotik router + usb cell modem, very inexpensive, especially when combined with a M2M plan.
Regards.
Faisal Imtiaz
Snappy Internet & Telecom
7266 SW 48 Street
Miami, FL 33155
Tel: 305 663 5518 x 232
I am well aware of email-to-sms, but that is dependant on
links/infrastructure that you are monitoring. (Think of it like having your
Nagios system running on the same hypervisor as your other production gear.
What happens if the hypervisor drops? How would you know?)
The hardware sms gateway allows for true oob notifications.
Scott, I was interested in that as well, it was in my original post. I’m considering that and the SMSEagle; both are from Europe. I can’t find too much on them from a real world war stories perspective, but there has been mention of the FoxBox on nanog in years past, so there are some users out there.
I am not going the Microtik+cell modem route that Faisal mentioned in his reply post because the intent is to tie the SMS alerting into other systems using some form of API, and both FoxBox and SMSEagle make that incredibly easy by having a simple http interface for sending texts, or a full API if you need to do two way. The nagios plugin (and Zabbix too) are super simple since it’s just HTTP POST to send the alerts.
FoxBox claims it will work on Verizon networks because of the 3G support, but that doesn’t leave me with a comfortable feeling, so if we buy in, we’d probably get accounts from a GSM carrier for it, although I can’t find whether or not AT&T, etc. offer machine accounts, and I would not want to pay $50/mo per device just to send random texts.
I did get an off list reply from someone who let me know that our existing OpenGear devices (cell+ethernet console servers that run linux) have the ability to send SMS using a utility already present in the OS install. Since we already have those in every location we’d also be putting an SMS gateway, I’m going to investigate if we could put a cgi script or something similar on them to accomplish the same goal with no additional equipment.
Based on a cursory pass of the FB website I can't find any of their
products that have a CDMA modem - so they're definitely incorrect in that
sense. Voice, text, 2G and 3G data are all CDMA on Verizon, unless you're
doing something with SMS over IMS which is only supported with LTE capable
hardware on the Verizon side.
Been using it for 5+ years -- first three years the code wasn't stable, needing a reboot every few months, but the latest code has been stable for 2+ years.
Been using it for 5+ years -- first three years the code wasn't stable, needing a reboot every few months,
but the latest code has been stable for 2+ years.
It looked interesting until I got to the part where it says it uses a
2G GSM modem. AT&T has said quite firmly that they will turn off
their 2G network in 2017, and press reports say that T-Mobile is
already turning off 2G in favor of LTE.
I last purchased a USB "3G modem" for around $12 including shipping
which supports SMS. it doesn't need to use the 3G part for data though, just
for the control channel.
There are cheaper ones to be had, but this isn't exactly something
that is a budget breaker. Get a good provider and life will be just
fine for you. I have a T-Mobile SIM in mine and they don't charge for
most international texts like other carriers so makes a perfect SMS
device. (Looks like HSPA+ LTE ones can be had around $40 without putting
much effort into it).
The biggsest problem I had was setting the AT command to make it
default to the right mode vs using usbmodeswitch in Linux, but mostly because
this was the first device I used like this in over a decade myself.
I picked up two of the AT&T "Beam" USB devices that use the LTE network.
Netgear is the listed manufacturer and has firmware for the units that
makes them usable on Linux. I loaded the driver for those into a Debian box
and I'm able to use smstools open source software to send SMS from the unit
directly to cell network. The AT&T Beam's were $20 I think and cost us
about $15/mo as additional lines on our corporate plan.
