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A good free way to achieve this is to use Signal. This project https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli enables you to send Signal messages from the command line, including from Raspberry Pis. It obviously needs an internet connection to work, but has the added bonus of being more secure than SMS.

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Neat tech, but probably not super appropriate for this person's particular application, which involved detecting network outages.

I'm guessing if that USB Modem can send SMS, it can almost certainly also get a TCP connection. (It is probably easier to find a sensibly priced SIM/plan that lets you sand a handful of SMS messages a year compared to one with a ultra low data usage internet connection though.)

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