Re: [nznog] Is there a Telecom paging tcp interface at all ?

The only issues I have had with SMS delivery have been the weekend that Vodafone introduced Free TXT Weekends, and for a few weekends after that, and New Years Eve nights. They took up to 2 or 3 hours to get delivered (but eventually did get delivered), but normally they come through pretty quickly. (I have a GSM modem at home attached to a monitoring box using SMSTools) I had an old Nokia with the data cable, but found it to be a little unreliable, where gnokii would loose detection of the device and not deliver any messages, another trap with using a phone, is does the phone shut the power off once the battery is charged, and then start to drain the battery, but not restart the charger... Anyway, back to lurking... On Sat, 2006-06-10 at 15:26 +1200, Phillip Hutchings wrote:

On 6/10/06, Jon Keller wrote:

...

You can indeed get any old nokia for $30 from trademe and add a ttl > rs232 level shifter (another $15 or so) to talk AT commands directly to the phone over serial, which will quite easily let you send text messages. I must say however that I've tried using sms in the past for outage notification with great failure. Getting a server outage notice 6 hours after it actually happened is rather annoying, but that was vodafone, are telecom more reliable? Is that a question I even need to ask?

SMS is a 'best-effort' system. Your message goes to the SMS service centre and is forwarded at the network's convenience, or it may be dropped if the network is overloaded, just like IP. This is especially noticeable with international SMS gateways, which can only send to GSM networks, so Telecom is out. Oh, and lol lol lol :) :)

Pagers are generally on reliable networks. If you're really worried use a pager and dial out to them through a cellular network using a cellphone or some other device that supports it.