low power, low bandwidth data reception ... state of the financial art?

[djacobow]

I'm thinking of a project that will require a device to operate for years, receiving (but not transmitting) a few 10's of bytes of data daily wirelessly from a wide area network that works all over most of North America and Europe.

I'm looking for:

 * low power (but moderate power while receiving and being asleep most of the other time would be fine)
 * low cost (that is, chipset + antenna are a few bucks
 * low cost per byte: that is, subscription plans are cheap, maybe pennies a day? My hope is to be able to sell this device but not have to require customers to subscribe to anything, so optimally, I'd be able to prepay a few bucks for, say, 5 years' worth of data, which might be less than 100 kiB total over the whole lifetime.

The two potential candidates I can think of are the old satellite pager networks and GPRS modems. Is there anything interesting out there that I'm missing? Are there good "plans" available for products in the 10k-100k units/yr range?

[EmmanuelFaure]

Sigfox :
https://www.sigfox.com

[djacobow]

Thanks for the tip re: SigFox. One limitation seems to be that it is really designed for uplink primarily. Downlink capabilities are minimal.

that led me to several other candidates:

- LoRaWAN
- inGENU
- Weightless-N from nwave
- NB-IoT
- LTE-M

None of these seem quite ready for prime time in the USA, though. :-(

After a medium-dive into this world, it looks like there many fragmented technologies competing, but no clear winner, and really not much in the way of working wide area networks.

[krho]

Does hologram.io work for you?

[danadak]

ESP8266 using sleep mode. Google that, lots of reference projects
send/recv data and sleep mode. Youtube as well.

Basically wireless IP based. Can use part as server or client or both.


Regards, Dana.

[djacobow]

ESP8266 is WiFi and BT, right? Neither are really suitable for my project as I really need a Wide Area technology. Something available from a "carrier" is preferred, but not absolutely required. But I cannot rely on a WiFi hotspot nearby.

[djacobow]

hologram.io might be ok for us. Technology is generic 3G GPRS with their proprietary stack on top, but that's for me. Pricing might work for me.

What I'm seeing after doing a deep dive over there past few days is that low bandwidth low power machine to machine networking is hot, but very much unsettled. It looks like North America is going towards LTE-M and Europe is going to NB-IOT, both 3GPP standards, but the networks and hardware are mostly not in place. ATT does have LTE-M ready, though there aren't many modules and Dev kits.

For people who want a technology they can deploy now without taking on a science project, choices are pretty much 3G data.