GSM cellular support

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I’ve looked around and I’ve found the following items that will work:
PCI GSM cards - around US $1,700
GSM SIP gateways - over US $2,000.

Are there any solutions that are any cheaper? I mean, all we’re doing is connecting a cell phone to a PC. We’ve done that for years with landline phone modems. These prices are as bad a propietary PBX hardware.

I am looking to send & receive SMS msgs and process them via asterisk. That is one requirement.

Thanks for the help.
Dave

2

[quote=“dcabot”]I’ve looked around and I’ve found the following items that will work:
PCI GSM cards - around US $1,700
GSM SIP gateways - over US $2,000.

Are there any solutions that are any cheaper? I mean, all we’re doing is connecting a cell phone to a PC. We’ve done that for years with landline phone modems. These prices are as bad a propietary PBX hardware.

I am looking to send & receive SMS msgs and process them via asterisk. That is one requirement.

Thanks for the help.
Dave[/quote]

I understand chan_bluetooth and chan_cellphone can help you to originate and terminate PSTN calls through your cellphone. I’m not sure whether or not they support SMS though.

For European’s who have to pay ridiculous charges for calling cellphones, we can buy a bluetooth dongle for Asterisk, and then program Asterisk to route all cellphone calls through our cellphone and take advantage of the free minutes on our cellphone calling plan. Furthernore if we want Asterisk to forward calls to our cellphone when we’re out, we can buy a dirt cheap cellphone that has bluetooth and get the cellphone company to add this to our “friends and family” program.

There are many solutions that allow SMS from a PC, some web based and some using software (mainly Windows though). Some cellphone companies even have an email interface like US pagers. So even if it isnt directly possible, I’m sure you can get Asterisk to integrate with what you have got.

So you should be able to do what you want for less than $50 (assuming second-hand/basic GSM cellphones are as cheap over there) :smile:

I’d like to know if chan_cellphone will work directly though?

Hope this helps.