Of course these prices depend on device volume. Twilio may be able to offer lower costs because of their scale, but perhaps Hologram can provide a better user experience because this is the only thing they do.
I work for an IoT company, and I can tell you that data costs are high for IoT because the cost model is different. You purchase a 10GB plan from AT&T for your cell phone and they know that you likely won't use it all, so they can "oversell" data. With IoT, you have a much better handle on how much data you use so when you purchase a 10MB plan, they know you will use almost all of it. Additionally, IoT devices tend to have higher backend infrastructure costs as they often connect/disconnect from the towers as they wake up and go to sleep, or move around between towers /carriers a lot. Plus the "always roaming" statement above adds cost in exchange for flexibility.
ATT offers an "unlimited" plan on their website right now with 100gb of "premium" (read unthrottled) data for $85/mo (goes down to $50 if you want 4 lines).
Twillio is charging >10x the rate per-byte. ($1e-8 / byte compared to the $1e-9 that ATT charges).
I don't know about you, but I use more than 1/10th of my data plan every month.
If you go to AT&T and say "I want 10,000 SIMs that'll let me use a few kilobytes of data a day, with enterprise management features", they either won't sell them to you or will sell them at prices comparable to Twilio (except they won't work when out of range of an AT&T tower, and certainly won't work overseas). Their minimum pay-as-you-go plan that includes any data at all seems to be about $30/mo - if you're using maybe 10 kilobytes a day, that's not feasible.
It’s showing $1.50/MB and $22/GB and it’s a network configuration that is AT&T except in areas that don’t have service it’ll allow regional carriers and TMo.
Hologram SIMs are price competitive here and allow devices to connect to the best network available without unfavorable network preference schemes.
You're only thinking about the data fees. There's much more to an IoT offering that is priced into that cost. There's plenty of enterprise features, for example. Bulk management of SIMs is a huge one: setting data limits per-SIM or per-fleet, activating/deactivating them for seasonal devices or new distributions. Also consider SLAs for your very important data, or dedicated support from the carrier. You don't need any of these things when you are managing one phone, or even a family of phones, but they are essential for fleets of 100's or 1000's of devices.
Also, keep in mind that is data being sold to you for use only on their network. Roaming fees will be exorbitant if you need to go outside their network, which may be needed to reach rural areas, or when you have an asset tracker traveling between states or territories. Keep in mint that "normal priced data package" has very predictable usage — your phone is almost always online, meaning the backend infrastructure costs are low since it's not constantly going offline/online. The tower going out and verifying an IoT device should be on the network (especially if going through a roaming partner) is surprisingly expensive.
Yes and no. Whether the phone is roaming or not, the cost of data is the very same (marginally, zero). The industry a s a whole has a major issue if they think they can sell data for 10c/Mb. What I'm saying is that this is chocking a potentially huge industry, where only the applications that transmit ridiculously little data (by today's standards) can be made economically. My feeling is also that the overhead of switching and accounting for 100 bytes or one gigabyte is very very similar....
These devices are essentially roaming wherever they are. The use case is that you're sending far smaller data than a megabyte in even a day - maybe a GPS update once an hour, that sort of thing.
These are just self-service pricing options to get people started on Day 1.
When we price custom for enterprise (i.e. specific countries, carriers, roll-out plan), the pricing becomes a lot more flexible. Should be seeing updates to that messaging soon.
My mailbox is in a block of other mailboxes that is fairly far from my home (say, 500m) and out of wifi range without an especially large antenna. I was thinking of making a small battery-powered widget to tell me when the mail arrived and adding it to my Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) installation.
Another use may be something like a device that warns if a locked, remote, storage area is accessed. In fact, almost any alarm system that lacks a cellular backup could add one pretty cheaply with this.
Now that I know this exists, I'm going to use it as a bag tracker to tell me where my baggage went when I travel. I'll probably just get one and use it as my car tracker to tell me when to move for street parking. Or maybe I can just inactive it.
How will you deal with charging? As far as I know connectivity has been a solved problem for over a decade now (on a small scale you could always just get a consumer SIM and use that), but power consumption is a problem. This is why Tile trackers for example use BLE tags and nearby phones instead of just embedding a SIM in their trackers.
The baggage only needs an infrequent duty cycle, right? Like once an hour should do the trick. I don't think I have to attach a large enough battery that I need to not put it in luggage. If it doesn't work out it doesn't.
https://www.eatabit.io is built on it. We were one of their first beta clients. We used every M2M carrier previously and Twilio is easily superior in cost & reliability. The cellular data space has alot of problems especially with roaming: cell phones transparently switch between networks but data SIMs have a very limited set of networks they can operate on. If Twilio can get VZW access on these SIMs they will have a very strong product. As it stands, coverage is limited.
