<quote who="Sridhar Dhanapalan"> > > How many is many? That can really affects the cost issue quite a bit. > > Are we talking a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, what? > > Easily millions. I'm sure we can achieve economies of scale, but they > still need to be ridiculously cheap for this to work. SIM cards cost > something like 50c, which makes them perfect assuming they can be used for > generic storage.
The problem with SIM cards, no matter how cheap they are, is that few people have a viable way of using them (regardless of whether you're able to find a SIM reader device that provides a generic USB storage interface). So, unless your read/write mechanism is deployed separately to the storage facility (I'm guessing by the interest in a generic interface that this is not the case), each SIM card will have to come with a reader. That cranks up your storage cost. If, on the other hand, your read/write mechanism is deployed separately, you may as well just go for something people already understand: Smart cards (a more familiar form of SIM card use/delivery/distribution). Or you could use phones. Possibly magnetic strips depending on the data. - Jeff -- GUADEC 2008: Istanbul, Turkey http://www.guadec.org/ "I'm taking no part in your merry 5-way clusterfuck - sort that mess out between yourselves." - Alexander Viro -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
