On May 8, 2008, at 6:20 AM, Kaj Niemi wrote:
Have you considered using a Siemens MC35i or TC35i terminal?
Basically you insert a SIM card, connect the terminal to a serial
port and talk AT commands with it to both send and receive messages.
It's not as easy as using a email-sms gateway service or XML but once
you get it working it will work forever.
We used one of those at $JOB[-1] for our out-of-band alerting of
system issues. The biggest problem, in the US, is convincing a carrier
to let you use it, and not turning it off every couple months.
Because it's not a device you buy "from the carrier", and it's
unlocked, etc., etc., we were *constantly* fighting with Cingular/ATTW
who, it would seem, would keep randomly turning its account off.
(Which, of course, you'll only ever realize when you notice that
you've stopped getting SMS alerts... if you don't have a lot of
problems regularly, that might take some time to notice).
And then, at least with the Special Circle of Hell known as ATTW
customer care, it was always a nightmare to get them to reactivate the
account.
I'm not sure what their reasoning ever was... it always simply
manifested as "cannot register with network" more or less. I'm not
sure if it was because it consistently had *0* minutes of airtime
usage, and a very low number of SMS message. Or if it was because it
would never register as any sort of device they were familiar with and
so assumed it must be evil (even after we explained time and again
what it was and what it did).
So, .US folks should be aware of the potential hell they might be in
for if they use one. Especially since the number of GSM carriers in
the US is limited greatly (one carrier with crappy network [TMO], and
one carrier with crappy customer service [ATTW])
Fun. :-P
Cheers,
D