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When you want to have telemetry from somewhere without access to a wifi network. The last I looked, SMS was also cheaper and lower power than mobile data.
by jpollock 6y ago
When you want to have telemetry from somewhere without access to a wifi network.
The last I looked, SMS was also cheaper and lower power than mobile data.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoTrue, but that's using SMS for telemetry (totally valid for use cases where power or connectivity are challenges) or remote control, not brokering SMS between another medium; this use case is forwarding SMS messages to Telegram. Maybe if you had a SIM for a geography that wasn't supported by a VoIP provider for programmatic access?
- jpollock 6y agoThink of this as much about being a learning exercise as anything else. The project doesn't need to stand on it's own - the creator gets to learn something about both sides. It's like seeing that M.2 is PCI-E, and wondering if they can plug a regular video card into it. :) Although for this project, I can construct systems in my head where this would be useful, centered around non-US mobile plans which are "calling party pays", with free on-net SMS. The US is "bill and keep", which makes sending SMS off-net largely the same as on-net from the carrier's point of view. In "calling party pays", having a device on the same network as the controlled device is about avoiding per-SMS charges. Author is in the UK, and UK is CPP. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227426633_Mobile_termination_charges_Calling_Party_Pays_versus_Receiving_Party_Pays https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227426633_Mobile_te...
- tyingq 6y agoI imagine they mean this specific use case where you need ip connectivity to Telegram anyway. If it were bridging to something local, it would make more sense.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThe problem is that fixed part of most plans’ pricing make the cost prohibitive, not the pay-as-you-go component (eg the cost of a sim and phone number). We were able to use a LoRa-like layer to forward to a base station that then uses a VoIP provider to do the brunt of the communication work.
- pjmlp 6y agoI hardly use more than a couple hundred from my 5 000 monthly budget to external networks, on the same network they are free.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoI think I failed to convey my point clearly. My point is that if you need a separate sim per IoT device, the (possibly monthly) cost of a sim and number will greatly exceed the cost of messages sent.
- pjmlp 6y agoAbout 15 € every couple of months, maximum 3 months allowed without charging, is the cheapest pre-paid I can remember around here.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThat makes sense. The provider incurs an ongoing (trivial to them in bulk) cost for leasing you the number so they can’t let them go stale - although three months is definitely more than lining their pockets. My VoIP provider charges a fixed 99c/month for each unique phone number. 15 € for three months is cheap for personal purposes when you have just a few in the field but isn’t sustainable for large scale deployment. I continue to be impressed by what can be accomplished in the 915 MHz ISM band; it’s not LoRaWan proper but you can achieve non-line-of-sight communication over a hundred and fifty miles (at obviously incredibly slow bitrates) with some signal conditioning magic. It would be amazing to spread a network of these around the world to enable constant low-bitrate communication without a base rate for pure pay-as-you-go options.