Has anyone used the Sixfab IOT SIM’s with a cellular modem for connecting to the MOTUS network? Our sensorgnome has the Sixfab LTE hat, and we are looking for a workable option for connecting. We have Rogers and Telus cell towers with good signal strength in the area, but contacting those networks about anything other than consumer cell phones results in a blank stare …
BofC has extensive experience with those, Josh can probably provide details on monday…
SixFab has worked for us in Canada and can be used in most other countries as well. In terms of cost, they have a pooled data plans across all SIMs which is cost effective when you have several stations using the service. We are also looking into trying out other service providers that specialize in IOT but haven’t sorted that out quite yet.
Each active SIM card costs $2.00/month. The cost for Canadian data depends on the monthly data pool you use, starting at $0.020/MB for the smallest pool. We use the 2 GB pool for ~20 connected stations which ends up being about $0.017/MB. On average we use about 2 GB a month which is $33 plus the sim fees ($40).
There have been issues with it being unable to find a service provider when the cell signal is poor, but it’s not clear what the source of the problem is. Thorsten has suggested it’s an issue with the international SIM card not being able to find a carrier and that single-carrier cards may perform better in those instances, but that has yet to be tested.
Perfect - exactly the information I was looking for. We have both Rogers and Telus towers less than a kilometer away from the site we are looking at, so signal strength isn’t likely to be a problem.
Rather irritating that those two providers can’t be bothered with answering phones, DM’s or email.
I’ve chatted with Bell and Telus about their plans for IOT and they aren’t very enticing. It’s geared towards higher data usage, high cost projects where there are vehicle fleets and everything. Their costs are much higher and don’t seem to good low numbers of deployments.