I was wondering if it would be possible to modify the Chateau to be a LTE gateway (SIM box / SIM bank). I was wondering to get a Chateau for house in Europe, and since the SIM for it would be used for just the data connection it would be great if i could tap into it for the SMS and Voice.
So to be able to tie the SMS/Voice through the data connection to my PBX?
I realize that this is probably wishful thinking however when searching i see some people have scripts for SMS so it seems like it might be partly feasable.
It would be great to be able to use the full functionality of the SIM card.
I’m confused at what you’re trying to do. A SIP trunk could run over the LTE data connection, and any PBX message (like SIP SIMPLE etc), would go via IP+SIP.
But there is no way to tap into any voice stuff from RouterOS. Plus modem modules may not even have software needed. And one that did (typically older modems), it was done via different lines from the miniPCIe modem modules, that aren’t wired up on Mikrotik’s board.
While it is a data connection and RouterOS, modems do support SMS over the data channel & RouterOS has commands to send/recieve SMS. So that’s what’s possible.
So if you want to use the Chateau to forward SMS to PBX/SIP, it have to be done via scripting and/or HTTP/SSH. But there is no way to access the SIM directly, it’s wired to the modem module.
In the US, the big carriers can, for business/enterprise customers, do “SIP forwarding of calls”. i.e. Any voice calls get directed to an SIP endpoint on your PBX by the carrier before getting to the modem. But nothing about that relates to the RouterOS modem, since the carrier is doing forwarding of the voice line on an account to an SIP IP endpoint on your PBX.
I probably did not explain it well - but i think you deciphered my mumbo
The US is one of the few counties where there isn’t much differentiation between a landline and mobile number, they both support SMS. But in most of the world there is still a clear difference between a landline number and a mobile number.
In some VOIP configurations you can use a GSM / LTE gateway to send/recieve voice calls. Right now i have a MIFI (mobile wireless router) - similar, but much more limited, to the Chateau series. In that mifi is a SIM card from a French MNO which has the mobile data portion of the subscription, but it also has the SMS/MMS (Text) and Voice (talk) which are all tied to a specific mobile number. What i was hoping to see is a way of using the Chateau as a GSM/LTE gateway so that it could be integrated into a PBX,
Specifically, my PBX in north anerica could assign a trunk line to that SIM, so that calls to France would be sent through that trunk and appear to the destination number as orginating from my SIM card, and equally someone there could call that French number and i can route it to my phone in NA.
While i know technically its possible, i am pretty sure that the ability doesn’t exist in the Chateau. I suspect that there would be some fairly major re-working to achieve this.
I suppose some old school methods might work/get you closer.
For the SMS part… some SMS gateway operate by sending AT command over serial to modem that then sends SMS. Since SMS commands are all standardized, including on Mikrotik modems… This might work. RouterOS does has TCP serial interface (/port/remote-access) that you can wire up to the AT command port (via usb1) of the modem. It should have serial channel available for it, but /system/serial-terminal let you check a channel allow an “AT”. See https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Ports#Ports-RemoteAccess.
NOW…the SMS gateway need to support serial from TCP (aka RFC-2217) & use AT commands as the method to send SMSs.
For the calls, not so sure still what the call path looks like. But only thing you can do with a SIM in Mikrotik, is setup GSM-style “call forwarding”. And use a PSTN number on your PBX as the destination. I’m not sure this helps, and it use a channel, but PBX like could pick up the “transfer from” (ANI) part to know it’s that SIM.
But placing calling using the SIM in a Mikrotik device, there is nothing you can do. Unless you carrier had other weird feature on some old-school GSM “*” codes.
