The behavior with respect to Digi Remote Manager connectivity has changed. This applies to all XBee and XBee3 Cellular products. Here’s a description of the changes:
Old Behavior (firmware release) : By default, XBee Cellular establishes a TCP socket connection and sends keep-alives. Devices appear as “connected”. You can update firmware and take other actions on-demand. Functionality only includes reboot and updating XBee firmware. This is what was shipping as of 4/15/2019
New Behavior (firmware release): By default, XBee Cellular devices do not connect over TCP to Remote Manager. Devices send an SM/UDP poll once a day. A scheduled operation/task must be setup in DRM to get them to request to connect when they next poll DRM.
Why did we change it? Old behavior resulted in higher data usage. New behavior will result orders of magnitude less data usage (~10MB/mo decreased to ~10KB/mo). Note these are not exact numbers and actual usage may vary.
Overall Impact: Devices will not appear as connected in Remote Manager. Customers must use scheduled operations with SM/UDP request connect messages or can force a more immediate connection with SM/SMS (on devices where SMS is possible). It is possible to configure devices using a scheduled task to restore the old behavior, but this could take up to 24 hours to wait for the next SM/UDP poll.
Existing devices: Not impacted until upgrade. These should be tested before upgrading in the field.
New devices: All new shipping devices after the switch-over will have the new behavior. You can restore old behavior via XCTU or your host processor prior to deployment if desired.
Effective in these versions and higher:
XB3-24 802.15.4 Version 2003
XB3-24 Digimesh Version 3002
XBee-Cellular (all) Versions (x)xx11
Last updated:
Apr 19, 2019