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Hi Glyn

I would be very interested in any progress you make with this, I have a ZTE dongle to dev with but have not really tried to set it up, I have a project looming that could benifit from utilizing 3G rather than battling with some very tight security behind proxy servers.

Paul

Trystan has used the  Huawei e3231 usb dongle with good results: 

https://github.com/openenergymonitor/documentation/blob/master/Applicati...

He measured about 108Mb down and 151MB up per month

'Three' carrier charge £0.01/MB so 250MB/month would cost £2.50/month PAYG. 

Cheers, I will take a closer look at that dongle install guide, I would like to get one up and running to do some tests for reliability and data usage. Those figures are for http I presume, that can probably be reduced significantly using a remote mqtt broker instead maybe. I have 100mb/pcm "free for life" payg data sim from EE so I should really set it up and leave it ticking over just to test.

Paul

Good point regarding MQTT. How have you got a 'free for life' PAYG SIM?! 

I've ordered a few dongle and SIM cards to test with. Plan to get some testing going later next week. Got some remote hydro monitoring projects on the horizon which will require 3G. Would like to establish long term reliability and expected data consumption & costs.  It seems we're looking at minimum £5/month 

It was an offer posted on here over a year ago "Cheap SIM for data acquistion"

Paul

Nice, shame offer has expired. I wonder if I put my business hat and give the operators a call I could negotiate a custom low data usage and low cost for data logging applications. However I suspect I won't get anywhere until I can demonstrate a volume requirement. It would be great to be able to offer a good deal via our shop to OEM users. I think many installs (especially commercial) could benefit from being 3G based since it removes the dependence to link into a potentially unreliable network you have no control over. 

Maybe we can pool our demand volume for a deal, if I can demonstrate a reliable, cost effective use of a data dongle this would be standard my client would roll out to all of their sites.

The benefits for me and this project is there are very tight proxy servers at all their sites that are managed (restricted and policed) by a third party, each site is different so there can be no "standard" set-up. there is no possibility of "dialing in" for remote support or maintenance, so support can mean costly site visits and ultimately I am trying to develop a pre-configured single boxed solution that their own guys can physically install it and I can configure remotely. 

Paul

PS Negotiating individual plans may be tricky but for my application to negotiate many sim card into one data plan or multiple plans into one account may well be an easier option, 

I'm thinking about setting up this method for remote access
https://github.com/juslop/3G-tunnel

That is a really cool idea, I would like to set it up and try it before drawing any conclusions but the concept of sending a SMS to open a ssh port is very good, I'm not entirely sold on the reverse ssh and cloud server as it seems like adding more moving parts. I already disable password login and use a public key, the solution to the non fixed ip could be to just SMS back the ip address, email a link or to just use duck dns etc. 

I currently also like to use remote desktop access on occasions, although I have not tried this over 3G (maybe too data hungry?) it seems it would also be possible to "SMS open" the ports for the remote VNC connection instead.

I certainly want to try this out, good find !!

Paul  

It would also be very easy to adapt it to open/close any ufw ports too.

Just posted an update to developments on this thread:

https://openenergymonitor.org/emon/node/12305