This one has Modbus support for SMS too.
1 Like
I have read that it is much more secure...
Cellular Gateways.pdf (355.5 KB)
It is definitely more secure, especially if you disable all VPN functions.
1 Like
The irony of all these stupid little gateways is you'd probably be better off if all you used them for was to make outbound connections to Twilio 
1 Like
Twilio is too unreliable here, all our customers are asking to move off it. Direct SMS doesn't seem to die... Couple that with Twilio having no customer support to speak of, kinda boxes you in.
1 Like
Move to what? You can’t send any kind of volume operating your own modems. To another provider?
A lot of customers are using low volume notifications, all they need is 1-100 total SMS a day and it is relatively mission critical to get them delivered. Chuck in a SIM card with billed on the company mobile account and everyone is happy.
I have other options where we are talking directly to major carrier's APIs for the same purposes, better reliability and service guarantees from that end, and also not billed on a credit card like Twilio.
I've read numerous instances of people complaining that Twilio isn't reliable. It's not geared towards uptime or timely SMS. It's geared towards volume/mass SMS for campaigns.
What do you see as a drawback of using the Prosoft cellular gateways?
Yeah, this is Verizon EMAG etc...
Alarm Notification Profiles are one of the easiest extension points in the SDK, and we even have an example of it: ignition-sdk-examples/slack-alarm-notification at master · inductiveautomation/ignition-sdk-examples · GitHub
If you guys want to see what unreliable really is I invite you to take a stab at sending AT commands over serial to your modems and see how long you're happy with it. It was the first approach we tried 10? years ago before we ended up with this stupid Sierra Wireless thing instead.
1 Like
This is my point exactly, it's not hard to extend this stuff and make a neat module.
I was writing AT command based SMS back in 2008 for a Motorola RAZR Java ME app, I would rather not go back...
1 Like
I often hear reliability issues with Twilio, as well. Also, my last company sent 20,000 to 30,000 alarm notifications a day due to the size of the organization. At $0.0079 a message, it priced itself out.
We used to use the Sierra Wireless modems, but we had a lot of issues with them needing to be manually rebooted often. Also, if they get a flood of messages, it takes quite awhile for the messages to go out. The last message may go out minutes after the event, and in some cases, that's too long based on the severity of the issue. We even designed (alongside Travis Cox) a load balancer of 6 Sierra Wireless modems per Ignition Gateway and used SNMP to monitor the buffer queue of each modem; every new alarm notification went to the modem with the smallest buffer. This still had issues.
We ended up ditching Sierra Wireless, and subscribed to Verizon EMAG and Sprint EMAG. We sent SMTP relay out from Ignition to Verizon and Sprint and they converted to SMS. Both are decent services with good availability and uptime, but has limited functionality, and can be expensive ($20k to $30k a year each, for the number of messages we were sending, and we needed both because Verizon didn't have a cell tower for several of our locations in California).
Finally, I led a project to evaluate emergency notification platforms (to support messaging for all departments within the organization, including HR, PR, EHS). We evaluated around 10 solutions. The 2 that rose to the top were Everbridge and AlertMedia. They are being used in numerous municipalities throughout the country for city communication to residents and law enforcement, but are also being used in the private and industrial sectors. They have SaaS web UI portals where you can manage groups or send ad hoc messages for business intercommunications. They also have mobile apps on apple/android stores that support push notification. Users can opt-in to GPS tracking for automatic alerts based on location if an emergency is nearby, and admins can send automated requests for users to "check-in" to monitor evacuations zones or "man down" events. They support SMS, email, SMTP relay, voice, and even the ability to configure an event to automatically start a group phone call and call multiple people when a condition/alarm occurs and when you answer the call, you're conferenced and talking about it. Also really good diagnostic tools to troubleshoot if a message was delivered successfully or where the break was if it didn't. They also have RESTful API integration. Our design from Ignition was to call their API in the Alarm Notification Pipeline. For our organization, the cost for these services was cheaper than Verizon EMAG and had WAY more functionality and potential for the entire organization (not just SCADA).
6 Likes
I send about 40-50k sms thru twilio a month and never have any issues.
#blessed
When you say never have any issues, do you never see sms' be delivered late? Or do you just never see sms' just not be delivered at all?
1 Like