The limit of 60 bytes of down link is really what threw me off. For IoT sensors out in the wild that I've worked with we've still wanted the ability to remotely update their firmware. A 14kb firmware is do-able for a lot of systems, but if that update fails you don't get to retry for a month unless your firmware is incredibly tiny...

For systems that I've worked with that have firmware that small or even smaller have had power budgets in the <50mA/hour range... This modem uses up to a full amp at 3.3V (presumably only while transmitting but I'd bet its receive mode still busts that power budget in under a minute).

I can't think of the use cases for these modems that use that little data and have that much of a power draw...