SMS gateways

Wed Jan 6 23:31:54 UTC 2016

David,

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!

 -mel

________________________________________
From: David Hubbard <dhubbard at dino.hostasaurus.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 2:37 PM
To: Mel Beckman; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: SMS gateways

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.

David

On 1/6/16, 5:14 PM, "NANOG on behalf of Mel Beckman" <nanog-bounces at nanog.org on behalf of mel at beckman.org> wrote:

>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.
>
> -mel