Consumer-grade cell phones suck. Especially the free ones that come with your plan, effectively subsidized by the obnoxious rates carriers charge for voice, data and SMS traffic. We’ve been having problems with our Nokia 6350s (at work) that we use for automated Nagios alerts over SMS – the phone locks up or powers off, and the only fix is to drive to the data center and manually reset the phone. Fun.

Recently, another group at work let us borrow a pair of seriously cool MultiModem® GPRS Wireless Modems – in essence, serious grade “cell phones” that talk to the computer over a serial port. They don’t have the ability to do sound, which limits usefulness as a phone, but they are full on AT command set serial modems that can send SMSs. They act as a drop in replacement for gnokii and gnokii-smsd, which we use for automated Nagios alerts, and they can be reset from the command line. We may even be able to use them to replace the analog phone lines we use for our alphanumeric pagers, which would save us a couple grand a year in phone line costs.

I’ll keep posting here with comments and updates.