[rozzie]

There are no tricks to the Notecard's pricing. The 500MB/10-years of data is embedded within the hardware pricing, which is $49 for North America and $59 for 135+ countries.

What's more, it's "permanent roaming" and you don't need to identify the end-user of the device. It can be used anonymously.

[__sy__]

Welp, first, thank you for taking the time to respond here. My mom won't believe it when I tell her that THE Ray Ozzie responded to my random HN comment :)

Second, could you comment a bit on the latency/bandwidth of your solution? I was poking around the site and couldn't find that answer immediately available.

[rozzie]

Happy to comment. We've been working on this for several years now and we're super proud of what we see people building and deploying.

The question is a bit general, so let me just give you some related facts.

- Because more than half our customers use this in a battery-powered way (such as a tracker), the normal operating mode (json-configured) is "normally quiescent" (~8uA draw) with the modem powered off completely. You program the sync period and can also kick off syncs manually, for example if you sense an urgent condition.

- In this "periodic mode", syncs are usually take about 15 seconds to register, 1 or 2 seconds to sync, and then hanguup. If you configure for TLS it sends about 4KB for the TLS session setup, and if you don't care about on-wire encryption you can use straight TCP at about 1KB. A half dozen reasonably-sized JSON notes compresses to about 250-500 bytes on the wire.

- Many customers don't use it battery-powered - such as embedding it inside an air handler or generator, etc. When in this mode, you can configure (JSON) it to be connected in a "continuous" mode. Not much downside - just a 1 packet (40 byte TCP header + 1 byte) for a ping every 20m for robustness.

When in continuous mode you get "instant sync" upstream, and get a bonus feature: If you use an HTTPS (JSON) API to send an inbound message to the device, it syncs instantly to the device.

- Our packets are so tiny that nobody ever thinks about actual modem bandwidth. However, you'll notice it when you're using it for firmware update. (We support DFU of modem, of our firmware, and of your own host MCU's firmware.)

We have 2 primary SKUs for the product: our "Narrowband" SKUs based on BG95 which support three RATS: LTE Cat-M1 (~375Kbps), LTE Cat-NB1 (~64Kbps), and GSM (~100Kbps).

For $10 more you can buy our "Wideband" SKUs based on EG91 which supports LTE Cat-1 4G/LTE, 3G, and GSM. These go up to 10Mbps.

Hope you find this interesting.

[torgoguys]

Terrific answer. Thanks for responding here! What kind of real world speeds are you getting on North American M1 (and NB1) networks? I know the rates that the carriers quote but see some people say to not really expect anywhere near those for these service levels.

My use case would probably want to push a fair amount of data (say 1MB) very infrequently in a semi interactive mode so there would be a user waiting for the transfer to complete. Thanks!

[rozzie]

YMMV but our experience with Cat-M has been very good with regard to speed and general coverage. (Probably because it was just a tower software for LTE eNodes.) 300Kbps+ seems to be the norm.