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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?"
Yup, please see "WTF is TAP" for further elucidation.
See, the problem here is unless there's someone else with the poster's exact problem (possible, but doubtful -- most people are trying to do everything they possibly can over a network connection, looking forward to the day they can iShit) -- noone is going to know what the heck this person is talking about. So until the original poster puts a little more detail into explaining their needs and their system, we'll probably all be in the dark and won't be able to help them.
I mean, the real mental stumbling point is this: if they've got a computer that can perform a modem dialup, why can't that computer just send a frikkin' e-mail, which pretty much every messenging service in the whole world responds swimmingly to?
The problem with email gateways is you have no way of knowing for sure if the email was recived, understood, acted upon and the SMS message was acutally sent.
In my reading, it sounds like AT&T has outsourced their TAP interface to EFI Unimobile. See the EFI Unimobile page on the subject. I guess it will cost, while AT&T's direct TAP number was probably free. However, it does sound like it will still be useful for sending alerts about your network.
:w