[BBLISA] Cell phone plan for a sysadmin?

[Alex Aminoff]

I've been using a 2-way email pager from Skytel since the 1990s. Sadly, 
between the refurbished pagers dying and social pressure from the 
family, I now need to get a cell phone.

I run basespace.net, a small local ISP, so I need to be available to 
customers. I will only use voice calls very rarely, hopefully less than 
10 calls per month. I need the phone to ring when my monitoring system 
sees a major problem or when a customer emails the emergency support 
address: This could be done with some sort of text messaging gateway, or 
data service that receives email and rings when a message comes in. I 
need data service so I can read email and ssh to my servers.

Cell phone plans are extremely complicated. I'm hoping I can hear from 
some of us who have similar needs and have found a plan that works well. 
The bottom line is, I don't want to pay very much money. I'm looking at 
some of the pay as you go plans, but it seems silly that you pay for 
minutes, but then if you don't use them they expire anyway. And some 
carriers seem to charge insane amounts for data on your cell phone. The 
pager was $17/month, I would like to get close to that number, or, 
perhaps with the right pay as you go plan, even less.

Thanks,
  - Alex Aminoff
    BaseSpace.net