Global sims?

[kjm]

I would like to use a global style sim in my GPYs because the lte modem setup is straight forward (eg lte.send_at_cmd('AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","hologram"') & tends to be the same regardless of the country the gpy is used in. Sadly the likes of hologram etc seem to be focused on data plans in the megabytes to tens-of-megabytes per month range, whereas my application is more in the area of your typical phone sim at hundreds-of-megabytes to gigabytes per month. This then creates the problem of not knowing what sim the overseas user might chose to use & what the 'AT+GCDCONT,,,,' cmd should be. Does anybody of know of any global style sims with a generous monthly data allowance?

[Gijs]

This post is deleted!

[jcaron]

@kjm 8 KB every 10 minutes is still less than 40 MB per month, much less than the gigabytes you mentioned earlier. Unless you were talking about aggregate volumes across many SIMs?

[kjm]

@jcaron nothing exotic, we just uplink a couple of analog metrics to a server every 10 mins. Trouble is the data needs to be real time for alarming so we can't hoard it for less frequent uploads & the oveheads of https means we chew through 8kb every upload.

[gt1]

Find your local data reseller. Then negotiate international rates. Every carrier has international rates with other carriers. Your local guys should be able to get you getter pricing then the holograms of the world.

Unless you are using very high amounts if sims/data the carriers don't want to deal with you.

At least here in my area. We are in Canada and have Canadian plans and USA plans from our local data reseller.

[jcaron]

@kjm Most subscriptions supporting Cat-M1 or NB-IoT for a reasonable price will be in the same kind of range. Those are low speed technologies compared to “full” LTE, which means the same amount of data takes more airtime, and airtime is expensive (it’s a chunk of the frequency bands carriers pay billions for). There’s a reason why in some places carriers will give a much higher allowance over 4G than over 3G. Cat-M1 and NB-IoT are really designed for low bandwidth low power applications.

Cat-M1 is probably not the right choice for a device sending gigabytes per month. It’s probably not even energy efficient for such a scenario, is it? NB-IoT is of course completely out of the question.

Hologram actually have nearly global multi-gigabyte per month subscriptions, but they’re quite unaffordable.

If you switch to “regular” LTE, then there are probably many options. Lebara for instance seem to have affordable international data-only plans (though I haven’t checked actual coverage). But that would require a different modem.

I’m curious about what your use case is, though...