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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Otherwise people would use it for IoT infrastructure. I certainly would.

I haven't actually made use of this yet, but Google Fi lets you purchase additional data-only SIM cards for $5 or $10 and then the data gets billed at $1/GB at the same rate without any minimum. So if you're only sending a few KB a day, you pay almost nothing.

Does the price for 1GB apply if you use only 50kb of data during the billing period or is it prorated?

I had fi for several years. IIRC it was billed as $.01 per megabyte. If I used 341MB, my bill was $3.41.

I think you would still pay for the full MB though.

As a current Fi customer, I believe that's correct. But I think this is also aggregated across all devices. So if you use 1KB on 5 devices, I think you only pay $1. There's also a limit of 4 data-only SIMs.

Good to know, thanks! Probably not something I’d want to use for a super low bandwidth application like hourly gps updates but definitely viable for something a little more “active iot”.

That's exactly what my mind jumped to when seeing this (free IoT!), can almost expect someone will try to build some sort of automated video watcher to work around this caveat and abuse it :)

that's fine. small abuse isn't worth the cost to enforce. abuse at scale, however...

Around 2000 there was a dial-up service called Juno. It took about 15% of your screen to show a rotating banner ad and had some time limit for use. As far as I recall every restriction was implemented in the client.

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.

Juno was great. There was another company similar to Juno with the same idea which I think started with an "N" if I remember correctly.

My dialup of choice was MetConnect. It was entirely free and fast no ads just dial in and use the Internet.

NetZero, who eventually bought Juno after they went under in the dot-com bubble.

I set up a local BBS-like system and used the real NetZero* dialer to call it and attempt to log in. Then I changed my password and repeated the process several times.

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..)

Reminds me of free dotcoms back in the late 1990s just up until the dotcom bubble burst: free but with a frame with a banner. 14 year old me enjoyed learning how to load (and then design around) my own page in that frame.

We weren't technically savvy at all, but still found a loophole. There was a version of the software that crashed after you had successfully connected. As long as you didn't update, you were ad-free.

Guess my IoT devices will have to learn how to watch videos.

That's what I was thinking :)

Are there cheap LTE+ embedded modules that support eSIM? All the ESP32/Arduino boards with mobile data that I've used in the past required a physical SIM card.

mhm, at least for older phones there is stuff like: https://esim.me/

no clue if it works to set the card up in a phone and then use it in a board?!

nrf9160

This infra would probably last a week max.

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