Console Servers & Cellular Providers

Tue Feb 13 04:21:09 UTC 2018

We have >100 AT&T units deployed and about 35 Verizon units and have had
virtually no issues with call home via openvpn.  All opengear ACM7xxx
series.

We are using machine to machine plans from marketplace.att.com. Used to be
a great deal, the new plans are still “fair” and better than standard
consumer/business prepaid plans. We average around 100MB/mo/device, we
could probably improve that with some effort on keepalives etc.

We have had coverage issues in some sites but in the colos we are in it has
been fine.
In colo we usually also take “house” IP due to XC costs blowing out any 3rd
parties, and I have done DSL on PSTN XC before, but even in those cases the
LTE is still useful particularly for turn up where the colo house ip rarely
“just works”.

On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 12:56 PM Randy Carpenter <rcarpen at network1.net>
wrote:

>
> Static IPs are useful for connecting to the "home" site. If our main
> office is offline for some reason, it is nice to be able to quickly connect
> via cellular OoB.
>
> I agree that other solutions (dial-home, or private network) make sense
> for satellite sites.
>
> thanks,
> -Randy
>
>
> ----- On Feb 7, 2018, at 12:47 PM, Chris Marget chris at marget.com wrote:
>
> > Lots of references to static IPs from cellular providers for OoB access
> in
> > this thread. Why? It seems like a dial-home scheme is an obvious solution
> > here, whether it's Opengear's Lighthouse product, openvpn, or whatever...
> >
> > Do you all have a security directive that demands whitelisted IP
> addresses?
> >
> > I've got a handful of OoB systems that dial home via cellular, but only
> > after they've been poked by SMS. Opengear's auto-response facilitates
> that,
> > and I've done it with EEM (to start DMVPN) on Cisco ISRs.
> >
> > The main headache I've run into is that it's tough to get a SIM card from
> > ATT that does data and SMS: ATT's M2M plans don't allow SMS, and moving
> the
> > SIM from an iPhone to "a computer" causes the SMS capability to vanish.
> My
> > ATT OoB boxes (used only where Verizon is reported to not work) are
> online
> > all the time.
>