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You might also see if you can just restrict interaction to a shell. That's definitely going to be much lower bandwidth (and thus more responsive). Then anything you can do in the shell, you can do through SMS. Updating an 80col screen isn't a completely unreasonable number of messages... especially if you're doing compression.

Security is probably a bigger issue.

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Couldn’t that blow up your phone? I could cat a million line file and it would take some time before I could do the equivalent of ctrl-c or close session.

The agent running on the remote machine would need to be aware of this issue and filter out long responses.

Yes, for example, just update the screen no more than once every few seconds. With no compression you can send chained 153 ascii character messages is only 13-14 SMS messages. With any compression, I suspect you could get refresh rates for most commands in less than a second in response to reasonable commands. Unreasonable command responses you could simply ^C or otherwise terminate the script.

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