I have a dumb phone that was on AiO Wireless (part of AT&T) that has now become part of Cricket Wireless (also part of AT&T). I have tried to both AT&T and Cricket in the Alarm.com interface to allow the phone to receive text messages, but neither setting seems to work. I receive texts on it all the time from other cell phone users as well as from things like Amazon delivery tracking, UPS tracking, etc etc. The other cell on my account, which is with another carrier (Net10) works perfectly when AT&T is selected (they are an AT&T reseller). Can anyone advise how I can go about troubleshooting this issue?
Thank you.
I’ve spent some significant time on the phone with the folks at Cricket, and here’s what I’ve come up with. I’m hoping someone with more knowledge of how alarm.com works will chime in.
It appears that alarm.com sends its SMS messages via e-mail. The reason that you have to select a carrier is because that tells the alarm.com system what domain to append to your number. Eg, with Cricket it is NPANXXXXXX@mms.mycricket.com While that probably works for most people, the $25 talk/text plan that I am on does not allow delivery of text messages through the e-mail gateway, therefore, no texts. For services like UPS delivery notifications, amazon package notifications and most other services, I have no issue because they send SMS natively, rather than by e-mail.
Can someone confirm that alarm.com does indeed use e-mail for its SMS notifications?
Thank you.
It looks like the SMS gateway for Aio Wireless is @mms.aiowireless.net so that would need to be added to Alarm.com. I’ve put in a request to Alarm.com to add Aio Wireless as an option. We’ll let you know what they say.
Yes, Alarm.com uses the carrier’s email to SMS gateway to send text messages. If your wireless plan doesn’t include their email to SMS gateway then you can’t receive texts from Alarm.com. I recommend push notifications directly to the app over texts anyway. Have you tried push notifications?
It is probably unnecessary to add the AiO gateway as AT&T has merged AiO and Cricket in to the single Cricket brand and the Cricket gateway they use, should work fine for former AiO as well as former Cricket customers and new Cricket customers.
As far as push notifications go, as I mentioned in my first post, this is a dumb phone with nothing but talk and text. I guess back to Cricket I go to attempt to get them to allow text messages through the gateway for the $25 plan or to create some kind of add-on. I’m assuming that I’ll have better luck with that rather than trying to get alarm.com to set up a native texting method that doesn’t use an e-mail gateway (ala Amazon, UPS, USPS, etc).
There is a very seldom used feature of Alarm.com that places automated voice calls to your phone as notifications. We don’t even advertise it because everyone uses text and push notifications instead. If you want, we can enable that on your account since your phone doesn’t receive text or push notifications. It’s $5/month but that’s cheaper than $25/month. Would you like that added to your account?