Spark Electron: Cellular dev kit with a simple data plan | Hacker News Reader

Spark Electron: Cellular dev kit with a simple data plan

kickstarter.com

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Ouch, that's quite a price for data when you can get gigabytes for $10 each.

I'm sure it's not their fault, cell companies love to gouge.

But I thought I'd compare with a couple other options*

Spark: $3 per device with 1MB, $1 per MB

Ting: $6 per device, $3 for 100MB shared

Zact: Requires a Zact device. claims $0 per device, can do 20MB for $1.40 or 100MB for $3.08, shared

* selected arbitrarily on the basis of Ting being an option I've heard good things about, and Zact showing up in search results when I tried to remember the name of Ting

I think it's pretty obvious that they're not trying to compete in cost per GB. The point is that if you're running a sensor that phones home once a day, you probably have less than 1MB's worth of data to send per month anyway, so your total cost with Spark is $3, whereas for Ting it would be $9. That the Ting option comes with 99 more megabytes is immaterial if you don't have 99 megabytes' worth of stuff to send.

Price per GB is not their main concern, but it's still pretty amazing that the price is far more than ten times higher than it could be.

I'm just pointing out that while this is about as good as you can get for 1MB, if you need perhaps 5MB there are better options, and god help you if you try to use 20MB on this plan.

You're treating it as if transfer is the only cost associated here. Every one of these lines requires consuming a telephone number, which is a fixed cost passed down from the MVNO

That's the $3 part.

Two things:

It's annoying that they are selling a 2G model. It'll be useless about a year after they start shipping.

The data rates are absolutely comedy. Considering EU roaming laws mandate that carriers have to sell at a wholesale level at 5 eurocents/MB, that is a giant markup. Perhaps there is some level of basic admin on the accounts, payment processing etc, but charging 20x the wholesale regulated cost isn't great.

It's not useless in Europe, where 2G will be supported for years to come.

Will it? Says who? Already operators are refarming 2G spectrum out in the UK at least. There may be coverage but it may become increasingly patchy as it is reused for 4G.

Did they say anywhere who's network they were using for their MVNO buildout? I didn't see that on the Kickstarter page.

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