Alternatives to TAP for Outage Alerts?

anton[1452] asks: "AT&T Wireless has discontinued TAP dialup access to text messaging. I have used this for years to send alerts in the event of network outages. The alternatives they offer are not free and worse, require network connections - making them useless for my needs. Does anyone have a better way to do this without resorting to carrying a separate pager?"

Comments

Re:GSM or GPRS modem

[Zocalo]

I know that SMS is supposedly not as reliable as a dedicated pager, but I've done exactly was you suggested and never lost an alert. Latency was not an issue either, I don't think it ever took more than 30 seconds from SMS generation to delivery. Then again, this was in the UK and not the US, so your telco mileage may vary and having a facility to resend the SMS if the alert is not acknowledged within an arbitrary time may be a good idea in any case.

We used an old Sun Ultra 5 acting as the "base station" and Kannel to talk to a mobile phone plugged into the serial port. That's basically it. We could generate an SMS via email or directly scripting Kannel, depending on what we were trying to do, and also provided a webform for human use.