3 ms·

I see everyone is focusing on 3rd party providers. Here is another solution: smstools (https://packages.debian.org/buster/smstools https://packages.debian.org/

I see everyone is focusing on 3rd party providers. Here is another solution: smstools (https://packages.debian.org/buster/smstools https://packages.debian.org/buster/smstools), and a bunch of SMS modems pluggined into a USB hob. A SMS modem can send SMS in under 5 seconds. They say 200,000 a day max, so lets say you want to cope with sending 200,000 in 4 hours. That's a little under 14 per second, so lets say 15 per second. You need 75 modems[0] to do that, or about AUD$4,000 worth of modems. Sorry for the AUD$ - I'm Australian. You will also need SIM's - or about AUD$1,500 worth. Don't worry about having 75 modems in one spot, the mobile phone network is designed to cope with a stadium of people all sending at the same time. Perhaps you want to shard it for reliability - maybe 5 machines, so add another AUD$5000 for a NUC or similar all with a minimal Debian install + a web server or whatever for whatever delivery mechanism you are going to use to get the SMS's to the servers. That's AUD$10.5K total. Write some glue code - which is a week tops and job done. The one question I'd be asking is how does that compare to using the cloud. Third party providers charge around AUD$0.05 per SMS. They say a minimum of 100,000 SMS's per day - or AUD$150K / month. The cost for the non cloud solution is AUD$10.5K for the first month, then $1,500 / month after that for the pre-paid SIMS. Downsides: when it breaks (and it will), you will have to diagnose what's going on. That can be hard if the cause is a welding shop starting up next door. You are also going have to deal with the telco's screwing up their SMS infrastructure which seems to happen in Australia every 12 months or so. But you can fight that to some extent by geographically distributing your NUC's and using several different telco's servicing each NUC. That way it becomes more obvious what failed. Finally, instead of NUC's use industrial rated PC [1] to get your reliability up. [0] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283828240407 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283828240407 You need the version with an 'S' (for serial interface) suffix, although you can often just change the firmware. [1] https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/ https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/, industrial temperature rated. So, no stinking air conditioning required. :D

ryanlol 7y ago
Why not just buy a sim box instead?
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  I've used Hypermedia’s SIM boxes. They are pretty good - neat install, didn't break for a long while, well documented. Also very expensive what what they did, but hey you are paying for a boxed solution, right? Maybe when I was young. But I have grey hair now. I'm sure some of it is grey because over the years I've made too many on off purchases of specialised boxes promising to do everything I needed at the time. The expensive, nerve racking disasters I've had in IT were caused by boxes like that - raid arrays that used some "high speed" proprietary format, IBM SCSI boxes that needed specialised IBM disks whose firmware bug happened to spray shit across the data flowing across the SCSI bus on occasion, hell even specialised Telco APN's they work for a few years then didn't, and after 6 months they admitted they had fired the people who set it up. When that Hypermedia box died (and they all do eventually), I phone up the suppler - and a replacement was an order, payment, international freight, and customs away. That was weeks. So we are down for weeks. The alternative is to make do with off the shelf retail components that is sold to ordinary punters every day. Yes, the components aren't as reliable. You also have to provide glue - but you write the glue or use open source, so visibility into problems is excellent and the response time is amazing. And they are dirt cheap, so you can keep a couple of hot spares on the shelf (as you would if you had 75 modems). Failing that getting new ones is just a case of going down to you local retail outlet and picking one off the shelf. And they actually have _less_ bugs, partially because there of millions of them out there, and partially because a retail brand will be overwhelmed if their channel fills up with failures. I saw a misbehaving IBM SAN take out video production house once, and the 100 people who worked there. (Turns out movie length video editing pushes a SAN very hard.) I didn't make that purchasing decision, but I may well have back then. There but for the grace of god go I. I've came close enough as it is. So no 128 x SIM boxes for me thanks. For what it's worth, a one off expensive box is worth it if the purchase price includes a man carrying the requisite spares on your door step with 8 business hours when it breaks. Big companies like Dell, HP and IBM do that for their big iron. (In an amazing coincidence, the boxes they are willing to cover with that sort of service for 5 years at a moderate increment in the purchase price almost never break.) The other time I'm now willing to purchase specialised boxes is if they are mostly open source (so I have visibility, and very little bespoke poorly road tested complex code), and I'm purchasing 100's of them so I can realistically price in keeping a bunch of them on the shelf in the initial purchase.

ryanlol 7y ago

Why not just buy a sim box instead?

rstuart4133 7y ago
I've used Hypermedia’s SIM boxes. They are pretty good - neat install, didn't break for a long while, well documented. Also very expensive what what they did, but hey you are paying for a boxed solution, right? Maybe when I was young. But I have grey hair now. I'm sure some of it is grey because over the years I've made too many on off purchases of specialised boxes promising to do everything I needed at the time. The expensive, nerve racking disasters I've had in IT were caused by boxes like that - raid arrays that used some "high speed" proprietary format, IBM SCSI boxes that needed specialised IBM disks whose firmware bug happened to spray shit across the data flowing across the SCSI bus on occasion, hell even specialised Telco APN's they work for a few years then didn't, and after 6 months they admitted they had fired the people who set it up. When that Hypermedia box died (and they all do eventually), I phone up the suppler - and a replacement was an order, payment, international freight, and customs away. That was weeks. So we are down for weeks. The alternative is to make do with off the shelf retail components that is sold to ordinary punters every day. Yes, the components aren't as reliable. You also have to provide glue - but you write the glue or use open source, so visibility into problems is excellent and the response time is amazing. And they are dirt cheap, so you can keep a couple of hot spares on the shelf (as you would if you had 75 modems). Failing that getting new ones is just a case of going down to you local retail outlet and picking one off the shelf. And they actually have _less_ bugs, partially because there of millions of them out there, and partially because a retail brand will be overwhelmed if their channel fills up with failures. I saw a misbehaving IBM SAN take out video production house once, and the 100 people who worked there. (Turns out movie length video editing pushes a SAN very hard.) I didn't make that purchasing decision, but I may well have back then. There but for the grace of god go I. I've came close enough as it is. So no 128 x SIM boxes for me thanks. For what it's worth, a one off expensive box is worth it if the purchase price includes a man carrying the requisite spares on your door step with 8 business hours when it breaks. Big companies like Dell, HP and IBM do that for their big iron. (In an amazing coincidence, the boxes they are willing to cover with that sort of service for 5 years at a moderate increment in the purchase price almost never break.) The other time I'm now willing to purchase specialised boxes is if they are mostly open source (so I have visibility, and very little bespoke poorly road tested complex code), and I'm purchasing 100's of them so I can realistically price in keeping a bunch of them on the shelf in the initial purchase.