4 ms·

How do you know the TVs don't connect to any open WiFi network, or simply get shipped with embedded 4G radios ?

by ddalex 6y ago

mcny 6y ago
I used to think that would be too expensive but then I saw smartphones sell new for USD 20 on Black Friday and I also see one year of 200 MB a month data plans selling for USD 30. That’s retail. I have changed my mind on this: if you were selling a million televisions a month, you could absolutely make it work from a money standpoint. They don’t need to send back tons of data and they don’t need to do it particularly fast.
- foobiekr 6y ago
  A 3g module was $2.50 COGS in 2013 when I was looking into an IoT startup.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    And data and devices will be even cheaper in another 12-18 months once LoRa is rolled out nationwide in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I expect with a lot of these kinds of use cases you could get absolutely rock bottom volume m2m prices by promising to only use it during designated quiet periods when the network is underutilized.
  - rusk 6y ago
    I think you vastly overestimate how progressive telcos are with this kind of thing ...
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      Maybe, but I feel like there'd be a pretty easy calculus on it at scale— like "your competitor is cheaper. We're going with them unless you can cut your rate in half. One way you can do that is by giving us SIMs that only unlock for an hour once every 24 hours, and you can decide when that hour is, as long as we see our devices at least once a day." This should be pretty easy to implement on the telco side and it would let them monetize the dead time in the network, same as TOU pricing for electricity.
      - o-__-o 6y ago
        If you ship a device with a SIM card you then need to follow regulations to ship it. This means you, the buyer, can find out from the FCC what spectrums it speaks on. I don’t think mobile connectivity is a much needed option on TVs so you won’t find it. Connecting to open WiFi hotspots is a completely different beast and doesn’t leave behind a tell-tale trace
      - rusk 6y ago
        You would think it would be easy to implement ... technically ... but one has to remember that as well as being businesses many Telcos are large hulking great slow moving monsters draped with red tape and politics - anything that changes the existing ways of doing things is often a Herculean act and that strips any dynamism in the market. Don’t misunderstand me there are many discussions in the industry around realising the kind of utopian vision you espouse but these are all bound up in committees with a typical lifespan of > 10 years ...
        mikepurvis 6y ago
        Well, I'll take your word for it, as it sounds like you have first hand experience and I'm just speculating. But it doesn't feel like this should be the kind of thing that requires a standards committee to be involved— it's literally just a SIM whose ID is mapped on the backend to reject connections most of the time, or be so heavily throttled as to be practically unusable. There's no new protocol needed here, just a profile added to existing traffic shaping/limiting systems, all of which already have time of day awareness in support of commonly-available features like free data after 5pm or whatever. OTOH, perhaps it's simply a question of an insufficiently large addressable market for non-realtime data like this. Maybe there's room for an M2M-focused MVNO to negotiate a block of off-hours data for dirt cheap and offer this kind of service, maybe paired with some kind managed platform to handle the storage and transmission side.
samastur 6y ago
You don't, but connecting them to a WiFi won't solve that problem because they can (and probably do) switch to radio if they can't reach their servers through Wifi connection.
0942v8653 6y ago
If there's a cellular radio. it has to be declared to the FCC. You can look up your TV's FCC ID to verify that it doesn't have one. I'm not aware of any TV that has an embedded cellular radio.

How do you know the TVs don't connect to any open WiFi network, or simply get shipped with embedded 4G radios ?

by ddalex 6y ago

How do you know the TVs don't connect to any open WiFi network, or simply get shipped with embedded 4G radios ?

mcny 6y ago

I used to think that would be too expensive but then I saw smartphones sell new for USD 20 on Black Friday and I also see one year of 200 MB a month data plans selling for USD 30. That’s retail. I have changed my mind on this: if you were selling a million televisions a month, you could absolutely make it work from a money standpoint. They don’t need to send back tons of data and they don’t need to do it particularly fast.

foobiekr 6y ago
A 3g module was $2.50 COGS in 2013 when I was looking into an IoT startup.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  And data and devices will be even cheaper in another 12-18 months once LoRa is rolled out nationwide in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
mikepurvis 6y ago
I expect with a lot of these kinds of use cases you could get absolutely rock bottom volume m2m prices by promising to only use it during designated quiet periods when the network is underutilized.
- rusk 6y ago
  I think you vastly overestimate how progressive telcos are with this kind of thing ...
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    Maybe, but I feel like there'd be a pretty easy calculus on it at scale— like "your competitor is cheaper. We're going with them unless you can cut your rate in half. One way you can do that is by giving us SIMs that only unlock for an hour once every 24 hours, and you can decide when that hour is, as long as we see our devices at least once a day." This should be pretty easy to implement on the telco side and it would let them monetize the dead time in the network, same as TOU pricing for electricity.
    - o-__-o 6y ago
      If you ship a device with a SIM card you then need to follow regulations to ship it. This means you, the buyer, can find out from the FCC what spectrums it speaks on. I don’t think mobile connectivity is a much needed option on TVs so you won’t find it. Connecting to open WiFi hotspots is a completely different beast and doesn’t leave behind a tell-tale trace
    - rusk 6y ago
      You would think it would be easy to implement ... technically ... but one has to remember that as well as being businesses many Telcos are large hulking great slow moving monsters draped with red tape and politics - anything that changes the existing ways of doing things is often a Herculean act and that strips any dynamism in the market. Don’t misunderstand me there are many discussions in the industry around realising the kind of utopian vision you espouse but these are all bound up in committees with a typical lifespan of > 10 years ...
      - mikepurvis 6y ago
        Well, I'll take your word for it, as it sounds like you have first hand experience and I'm just speculating. But it doesn't feel like this should be the kind of thing that requires a standards committee to be involved— it's literally just a SIM whose ID is mapped on the backend to reject connections most of the time, or be so heavily throttled as to be practically unusable. There's no new protocol needed here, just a profile added to existing traffic shaping/limiting systems, all of which already have time of day awareness in support of commonly-available features like free data after 5pm or whatever. OTOH, perhaps it's simply a question of an insufficiently large addressable market for non-realtime data like this. Maybe there's room for an M2M-focused MVNO to negotiate a block of off-hours data for dirt cheap and offer this kind of service, maybe paired with some kind managed platform to handle the storage and transmission side.

samastur 6y ago

You don't, but connecting them to a WiFi won't solve that problem because they can (and probably do) switch to radio if they can't reach their servers through Wifi connection.

0942v8653 6y ago

If there's a cellular radio. it has to be declared to the FCC. You can look up your TV's FCC ID to verify that it doesn't have one. I'm not aware of any TV that has an embedded cellular radio.