Raspberry pi Zero and USB 3G internet and XMPP = awesome IoT device

albert-david.blogspot.com

20 points·albert007_d··4 comments

Does anyone have any suggestions for cheap 3g and up modules? For 2g I can get a module off aliexpress that has 2g, GPS, and Bluetooth with a uart based interface for less than 15 bucks not including the antennas. For 3g, sadly I couldn't find anything anywhere near that price range and instead what I found was usually in the 40$ and up area.

In the USA, tmobile will be shutting down 2g in I think 2020, which is not that far off. Hence me wanting to get on 3g ASAP, but all solutions seem ridiculously expensive.

I haven't looked as 3g USB do goes in the past, they seem to be sub twenty dollars, but there is no way I am having my little micro with 8kb of ram run an entire host USB stack with enough resources left over for my code.

Here in Germany(or in India), its easy to find Huawei-E173 in the price range of 15 to 20 dollars, most of the time i just collect all those used usb-3g-sticks from ebay for a throwaway price of 4-8 dollars.

Have you seen http://Starterkit.att.com ?

Would it be of value if the cellular shield was sold on its own separately ?

not sure what is the monthly pricing of this developer sim card. Here in Germany, i use fonic/congstar prepaid sim cards from the super market for 10euro's which comes with 10euro balance. These prepaid sim card's have a data plan of 100MB/30days for just 2Euros. In my xmpp based raspi-IoT solution 100MB per month is sufficient - hence my running cost of this IoT setup is around 2Euros/month.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com