[aprssig] Re: APRS over TCP/IP Question (John Habbinga)

[scott at opentrac.org]

> Something to keep in mind though is that you will want to connect to a
> limited port on the server that you choose.  Picking port 23 
> or 10152 is
> too much for your card to handle.  

Or in the case of a high-bandwidth EV-DO card, you risk incurring the wrath
of your service provider.  Verizon's 'unlimited' plan is anything but, as we
discovered the hard way.

We've got a remote telemetry site (a test system for some homeland security
stuff) running on one of these, piping in quite a bit of stuff to our data
center.  Enough that we exceeded Verizon's secret (5 GB?) usage limit.  This
results in a nasty form letter accusing the account holder of illegally
downloading movies and music - though in our case all of the traffic was
3DES-encrypted and there's no way they could tell what we were sending.  And
of course it was only going to one destination, but they obviously weren't
looking at anything aside from the bandwidth usage.

In our case, the letter went to our corporate office, where someone assumed
it was a bill and set it aside for a couple of weeks.  When someone finally
opened it, there were only three days remaining before the shut-off date.
By the time they notified our office, it was only one day.  Getting through
to someone at Verizon with the authority to override the decision in a
timely manner proved impossible.  They shut off service to the card, and we
had to jump through more hoops to get it turned back on.  And that wasn't
the end of it - apparently their system requires that the card be in its
home (billed) area code the first time it's used.  The site is a 5-hour
drive from here, so it took 20 hours of driving to get it back on the air.

And it's not just us - see the second item down at
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060928.html.

Scott
N1VG