I feel like with the sheer amount of IoT options available, using hardware that's vendor-locked to a cloud service is a risky move.
Why would I choose this over existing solutions in which I can use any MNO or MVNO I want by swapping the SIM?
Why would I choose this over existing solutions in which I can use any MNO or MVNO I want by swapping the SIM?
The Kindle Whispernet model is my ideal, where you make an up-front decision to buy a cell-enabled product and it just works.
The classic model of monthly charging, activation, deactivation, etc used by the likes of the Apple Watch are not good for IoT because then someone needs to - ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on.
Of course, if you want to just use the Notecard with your own SIM, you can. The Notecard and all the standard Notecarriers have an external SIM slot (usually used when someone wants to use it in a non-covered country such as China).
To put it this way lets say the ODM makes a device for 40 bucks and sells it to you for 50. Their cost to their MDN/carrier is say 1 dollar per month per device. That means at best they can float you for is 10 months before you start costing them money. That does not involve any other services they may have to pay for to make that connection happen (support, VMs/machines, phone lines, datalines, buildings, etc). But if there is an extra ARPU on each unit that time to cost you money is much longer and in some cases never happen.
They way they priced this it looks like they are trying to get people into the ecosystem and are willing to eat some cost on that. Hoping to get a few whale accounts to cover the 'free' bits.
> ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on
That is exactly what MDNs like this do. They do that carrier abstraction for you. They do however charge for it. Each of the big carriers also do this and have programs for it. They have a list of pre-certified devices and 'try before you buy' style programs.
3G Whispernet couldn't outlast the carriers getting rid of the hardware to support those frequencies. So yes, that means "forever" didn't work price-wise, in that Amazon didn't feel it was worthwhile to build their own outdated-tech cell network just to continue it, but it was still a reasonable "for most of the life of the device" offer - note that newer devices have 4g and still will work.
There are no tricks and our prepaid/embedded pricing is real, and we will never sell anything for a loss. We're selling commercial IoT and our business must be sustainable. (Free tier of Notehub is an acquisition cost and that cost is extremely low.)
It looks like pre-paid data cards which eventually 'run out'. Which should keep you from having any loss. Aside from incidental support and promotional costs.
It sounds like you are building a similar business that I used to work at. Good luck! It is a tough market with a long tail sales cycle. Some go 'quick' and are up and running in a couple of months. Some take a couple years to get really going.
If I have one piece of advice. Keep an eye on your 'connect/disconnect' metrics. You always get that one device that will decide to bounce the connection 80k times per day. Get a few dozen of those and it will swamp out your other devices.
I feel like this is a double-edged sword for consumer products. Right now, I can keep my smart TV 'dumb' by not connecting it to my WiFi. I have reservations about a TV that has a GPS antenna (for my Zip code) and has its own pipe to the internet that I have no control over.
Or maybe just covering the entire back of the TV with foil tape would do the trick in most cases.
AFAIK from an above comment by @rozzie the protocol is open and the domain can be changed. So it should be possible for someone to write a self hostable server
https://dev.blues.io/reference/notecard-api/hub-requests/#hu... https://github.com/blues/note
Though yeah, definitely you and your investors need to have enough confidence in this venture to want to hitch your train to it.