On 3/30/17 5:52 PM, Kurt Keville wrote:
I would imagine you could get a pretty good bulk rate when you are
using as many minutes as Bigbelly...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_virtual_network_operators
2G should be sufficient, I suppose?
Buying in volume is helpful, but the reality is that Bigbelly's and
other IoT devices like them usually send very little data--we're talking
a couple of KB per day; so the real money savings is in getting
contracts that keep the per-device cost low, and then minimizing your
traffic while maximizing your data set.
2G data rate is more than sufficient, but the issue now is coverage--In
the USA coverage shrank significantly this year when AT&T shutdown their
2G network; T-Mobile is the only one staying up for now with a promise
of coverage until 2020, and they are specifically targeting M2M / IoT
customers still running older gear--I'm sure they're trying to pick up
all the legacy business and hoping to grab a bigger share of the new
business while they're at it; Europe will keep 2G up for longer, but
some countries there are already shutting it down as well.
3G "sunset" writing is already on the wall too.
Hopefully LTE Cat-M will be a very long lived network option for IoT
manufacturers.
-Ethan
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