It does seem that your cellular is only active for an hour after you last watch an ad, which is unfortunate if you want to receive notifications throughout the day.
It actually sounds terrible. I can get a minimal prepaid sim for $30/year (200MB/mo + basic voice and text) and that sounds preferable to this thing with ads.
And sure, you can pay and get a better experience, but not sure that's a fair comparison, this is free after all. If you can't afford to pay anything (sometimes people end up in shitty situations), then maybe watching a video for free internet isn't that big of a deal, when the alternative is no internet at all.
Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution?
Seriously, what is the audience here?
There are plenty of places where there are no "free wifi hotspots", like many places that fulfill the extreme "not a city" criteria. Maybe it looks differently where you live, but if I go with my car one hour inland I'll end up in places where I'm sure I wouldn't be able to just find free wifi hotspots everywhere.
> Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution?
I don't know, ask the company if they're planning to offer a global solution and if they say yes, ask them why? Not sure how that's an argument against the service in the first place...
What is the intersection of people who "have a car and are able to drive one hour inland" and "are so cash strapped that will subject themselves to a 'free' phone service that makes them watch ads every hour"?
Also important: who would be interested in advertising to these people?
I'm talking about the people who live in those places already... The part about "if I go with my car" part is just to help you visualize that there are places outside of cities.
What I am trying to say is that, while I am certain that you can fund this useful for a segment of the population, how big this segment needs to be in order to become valuable for (a) advertisers and (b) investors willing to sink money into it?
This is a similar thing that is comparable to your eBay link, but also doesn't feature roaming. 100MB a month for 5 years, for £16 one off: https://www.rwgmobile.wales/webshop/buy-forget/5-year-sim-da...
I’m all for the effort, and I am fond of business models that more directly convey the revenue from ads to customers, but I have some concerns for this business. It all could fade pretty quickly.
At this point I laughed, as I don't have global service, yet have flown round the world in the last fortnight.
> And the value of that ad inventory of people unwilling to pay is?
Yeah, I'm never going to click on your ads. Don't build a business model on me!
Striking at the eSIM moment is a slick move, though. This would likely have been a hard non-starter in the physical SIM era (which still applies in some cases).
I bought two data eSIMs to cover my trip - each one only covered one specific country.
To my frugal mind it wasn't worth paying the extra to upgrade to a 'global' data eSIM just to cover the handful of additional places I was in transit through (and turned out I had ready access to free wifi in those places anyway).
You can buy a SIM for $5 and get a free phone number that you can only use in their app, which has ads. I know plenty of people who that service could be very useful for, $5 one-time for unlimited text/talk, if inconvenient.
I do think that using Firsty and Google Voice together could accomplish the same thing for free, except Firsty's unlock-for-an-hour model means you can't receive messages when you haven't watched an ad in the last hour, so maybe TextNow still has some use.
I can change country with $60, it doesn’t mean I’m willing to pay $10/MB. I usually can get internet service for $10 or $20/month locally.
If I haven’t sorted out an eSIM before landing, it means I’ll be without internet until I go through customs. Airport WiFi isn’t at all a guarantee. What happens if I really need internet? e.g. some overzealous immigration officer really wants to see my hotel reservation or my return flight ticket.
I’d love to have a service that guarantees I have at least messaging in 60 (ad) seconds.
For US customers, T-Mobile US went to included global roaming at EDGE speeds (email, messaging), and Verizon is at the other end with $10/Day for 2GB at high speed (dropping to “3G” speeds after that).
Any business jumping into this space has to contend with that pressure and assailability, possibly relying on less-lucrative advertising bases of users outside of North America, Western Europe, etc. That doesn’t make it impossible, but I’d certainly be interested in the upper and lower estimates for the business potential. It just strikes me as a business where the network operators are really well-positioned to extract potential value while optimizing for the defense of their position. And when it comes time to re-negotiate terms, if this business is successful, network operators in regions with insufficient competition will be able to put the squeeze on, possibly forcing unworkable costs or loss of customer trust.
I hope this works out for them, for the reason that I also think that basic connectivity should be available to all, always, but those are the business concerns that immediately come to mind.
100MB/month attached to a Pi that has data for 5 years for only £16 looks to me like a great deal for an active monitoring site.
This looks amazing. Keep it installed, use it when I land (even if just to buy a better eSIM from Airalo). Don’t need to plan ahead, shop eBay, carry extra sims around. If I cross the border for an hour (live in Canada) might just use it for texts/slow web, or pay $2 for a day. Connivence factor is amazing.
As such there was a really easy workaround to connect directly without using their software and bypass every restriction.
A guy I know used that workaround and at some point got a letter in the mail from them because he was in the top 1% of users of the service which was very costly to them so they terminated the account.
My hunch is even small scale abuse of a system can have a big effect. Even if it seems small it still might be impactful.
My dialup of choice was MetConnect. It was entirely free and fast no ads just dial in and use the Internet.
That gave me the key to the Caesar cipher they used for the password.. so I could create a fresh account with a scrambled password any time I wanted.
At runtime, in the OS-provided ad-free dialer, I'd use the unscrambled password.
I also pre-created some accounts with unscrambled passwords like "apple" and "bicycle" to share with friends.
NetZero* ceased operations mere weeks after I started this.. Hm.
(* Was it NetZero specifically, or some clone? I forget..)
no clue if it works to set the card up in a phone and then use it in a board?!
I think you would still pay for the full MB though.
Is it just disabling your access except to a particular IP range and then enabling it back on receiving a HTTP request? Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Or is it DNS perhaps? That would seem to be the easiest layer to implement this on.
I'd really like a technical explanation here.
Why not?
I don’t know how this company actually has things setup, but I suspect you’re right — it’s all done with routing tables. DNS tends to cache too much, and I think DHCP would either be too chatty or also cache too much to be used as a gate keeper.
Instead, a firewall/routing approach would make more sense. It would technically be no more difficult than setting up port knocking. Instead of pinging a specific port, you’d watch a video. But other after that, you could just route traffic.
What I’d be more interested in knowing is where this filtering is taking place. It would be better done on the phone, to avoid null-routed data going over the network (and costing $/€/etc). So, I’m guessing that it is all done within the eSIM app itself. Maybe something like getting a (signed) token after viewing the video that extends a time limit/expiration for the eSIM itself. Then when the eSIM is expired, it can only communicate with one service — the ad host.
Simple version is the network router firewalls traffic to anything except the ad server, and the ad server will have a trigger to change the firewall. There are some technical nuances to how you handle DNS and also redirecting from other web pages (if desired) without breaking things. But that’s the gist of it.
Here is a paper on how websites could be identified for zero-rating: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343966537_Knocking_... It has a whole list of possible methods.
When your quota runs out everything you access resolves to the same address, which is an internal web site where you can buy more data.
And yes, it does not work if you use a custom DNS such as Cloudflare or Google Public DNS, or if you try to reach a HTTPS page. But they don't care, as it's a minority that does this. Android already has support for captive portals, and shows a notification when it detects one.
It's cool until you realize that it only exists to take advantage of poor people.
If the infrastructure cost was actually important, then they wouldn't serve ads in the first place.
What do you mean by infrastructure cost not being important? They either take a loss on the free plan to get downloads, the ads cover the costs and they break even, or they make a profit. All of those options seem fine and potentially sustainable to me (not sure about the loss leader though).
As for infrastructure costs, that's the entire service. How much does it really cost to provide 300kbit/s? Surely less than it costs to serve ads! Sure, you can turn a profit from the ad revenue, but that means your profit is the end user's attention.
My overall point is that we should not call ads "free". Watching ads is labor, and labor ain't free.