5 ms·

This seems pretty cool, so it's free slow cell service in exchange for watching a video ad every hour, with optional prepaid plans for higher speeds/no ads. It

This seems pretty cool, so it's free slow cell service in exchange for watching a video ad every hour, with optional prepaid plans for higher speeds/no ads. It does seem that your cellular is only active for an hour after you last watch an ad, which is unfortunate if you want to receive notifications throughout the day.

kristopolous 3y ago
Otherwise people would use it for IoT infrastructure. I certainly would.
- fullstackchris 3y ago
  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 :)
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    that's fine. small abuse isn't worth the cost to enforce. abuse at scale, however...
    - rubyfan 3y ago
      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.
      - brnt 3y ago
        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.
      - kmu526 3y ago
        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.
        terinjokes 3y ago
        NetZero, who eventually bought Juno after they went under in the dot-com bubble.
        daveloyall 3y ago
        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..)
      - philistine 3y ago
        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.
- vachina 3y ago
  This infra would probably last a week max.
- progbits 3y ago
  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.
  - universa1 3y ago
    mhm, at least for older phones there is stuff like: https://esim.me/ https://esim.me/ no clue if it works to set the card up in a phone and then use it in a board?!
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - landgenoot 3y ago
    nrf9160
- michaelmior 3y ago
  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.
  - devmor 3y ago
    Does the price for 1GB apply if you use only 50kb of data during the billing period or is it prorated?
    - gooseyman 3y ago
      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.
      - devmor 3y ago
        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”.
      - michaelmior 3y ago
        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.
- liftm 3y ago
  Guess my IoT devices will have to learn how to watch videos.
  - FloatArtifact 3y ago
    That's what I was thinking :)
throwaway81523 3y ago
How does it know that you watched the ad? Does it quiz you or what? It actually sounds terrible. I can get a minimal prepaid sim for $30/year (200MB/mo + basic voice and text) and that sounds preferable to this thing with ads. https://www.ebay.com/itm/133196831828 https://www.ebay.com/itm/133196831828
- diggan 3y ago
  It seems like it's your network provider so they have access to your network activity, seems like enough to know if you've watched a video or not. And sure, you can pay and get a better experience, but not sure that's a fair comparison, this is free after all. If you can't afford to pay anything (sometimes people end up in shitty situations), then maybe watching a video for free internet isn't that big of a deal, when the alternative is no internet at all.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Unless this company is targeting the "homeless people who are denied entry at public spaces" market, how hard is it to get access to a free wifi hotspot? Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution? Seriously, what is the audience here?
    - universa1 3y ago
      having this as a backup sounds nice to be honest. getting a sim card in the traveled to country was sometimes a bit of a hassle in the past... nowadays probably not so much. anyways, this might provide the time to get a sim card locally, as those often times used to be a lot cheaper, than some travel sim... and also might provide different coverage provider / network wise, depending which network they roam on...
    - diggan 3y ago
      > Unless this company is targeting the "homeless people who are denied entry at public spaces" market, how hard is it to get access to a free wifi hotspot? There are plenty of places where there are no "free wifi hotspots", like many places that fulfill the extreme "not a city" criteria. Maybe it looks differently where you live, but if I go with my car one hour inland I'll end up in places where I'm sure I wouldn't be able to just find free wifi hotspots everywhere. > Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution? I don't know, ask the company if they're planning to offer a global solution and if they say yes, ask them why? Not sure how that's an argument against the service in the first place...
causality0 3y ago
Still some non-travel potential I think. I might set this up on an old smartphone to keep in my car as an emergency backup, or maybe for avoiding risk to my primary like being on a boat, at the beach, etc.
miki123211 3y ago
I wonder how this works, if your cellular gets deactivated, how do you inform the service that you've watched the ad? Particularly if all you have is an app with no access to low-level system APIs like USSD, texting etc. Is it just disabling your access except to a particular IP range and then enabling it back on receiving a HTTP request? Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Or is it DNS perhaps? That would seem to be the easiest layer to implement this on. I'd really like a technical explanation here.
- mbreese 3y ago
  > Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Why not? I don’t know how this company actually has things setup, but I suspect you’re right — it’s all done with routing tables. DNS tends to cache too much, and I think DHCP would either be too chatty or also cache too much to be used as a gate keeper. Instead, a firewall/routing approach would make more sense. It would technically be no more difficult than setting up port knocking. Instead of pinging a specific port, you’d watch a video. But other after that, you could just route traffic. What I’d be more interested in knowing is where this filtering is taking place. It would be better done on the phone, to avoid null-routed data going over the network (and costing $/€/etc). So, I’m guessing that it is all done within the eSIM app itself. Maybe something like getting a (signed) token after viewing the video that extends a time limit/expiration for the eSIM itself. Then when the eSIM is expired, it can only communicate with one service — the ad host.
- lathiat 3y ago
  It’s just the cellular version of a wifi captive portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal Simple version is the network router firewalls traffic to anything except the ad server, and the ad server will have a trigger to change the firewall. There are some technical nuances to how you handle DNS and also redirecting from other web pages (if desired) without breaking things. But that’s the gist of it.
- __jonas 3y ago
  I'm assuming this would be done by zero-rating their advertising service. They already imply that they restrict traffic on their Free plan to certain services so I would assume they use the same mechanism to allow traffic to pass through their advertising service even when a users free plan has run out. Here is a paper on how websites could be identified for zero-rating: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343966537_Knocking_on_IPs_Identifying_HTTPS_Websites_for_Zero-Rated_Traffic https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343966537_Knocking_... It has a whole list of possible methods.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
That's not what free means. It's cool until you realize that it only exists to take advantage of poor people. If the infrastructure cost was actually important, then they wouldn't serve ads in the first place.
- jerbear4328 3y ago
  It might target people who can't afford cell service, but I don't see how that's taking advantage of them. Maybe it's profiting off them, but nobody has to use it. If it isn't worth it to you, then don't use it, but if it is, then do, and that's better than if it didn't exist. Nobody is forcing you to use the app, though. What do you mean by infrastructure cost not being important? They either take a loss on the free plan to get downloads, the ads cover the costs and they break even, or they make a profit. All of those options seem fine and potentially sustainable to me (not sure about the loss leader though).
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    It's about backing people into a corner who don't have the means to choose an alternative situation. No one is forcing you to have cell service? Sure they are! Good luck participating in society without it. As for infrastructure costs, that's the entire service. How much does it really cost to provide 300kbit/s? Surely less than it costs to serve ads! Sure, you can turn a profit from the ad revenue, but that means your profit is the end user's attention. My overall point is that we should not call ads "free". Watching ads is labor, and labor ain't free.
unconed 3y ago
If it's ad-supported, it's not free.

kristopolous 3y ago

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

fullstackchris 3y ago
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 :)
- kristopolous 3y ago
  that's fine. small abuse isn't worth the cost to enforce. abuse at scale, however...
  - rubyfan 3y ago
    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.
    - brnt 3y ago
      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.
    - kmu526 3y ago
      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.
      - terinjokes 3y ago
        NetZero, who eventually bought Juno after they went under in the dot-com bubble.
        daveloyall 3y ago
        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..)
    - philistine 3y ago
      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.
vachina 3y ago
This infra would probably last a week max.
progbits 3y ago
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.
- universa1 3y ago
  mhm, at least for older phones there is stuff like: https://esim.me/ https://esim.me/ no clue if it works to set the card up in a phone and then use it in a board?!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- landgenoot 3y ago
  nrf9160
michaelmior 3y ago
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.
- devmor 3y ago
  Does the price for 1GB apply if you use only 50kb of data during the billing period or is it prorated?
  - gooseyman 3y ago
    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.
    - devmor 3y ago
      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”.
    - michaelmior 3y ago
      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.
liftm 3y ago
Guess my IoT devices will have to learn how to watch videos.
- FloatArtifact 3y ago
  That's what I was thinking :)

throwaway81523 3y ago

How does it know that you watched the ad? Does it quiz you or what? It actually sounds terrible. I can get a minimal prepaid sim for $30/year (200MB/mo + basic voice and text) and that sounds preferable to this thing with ads. https://www.ebay.com/itm/133196831828 https://www.ebay.com/itm/133196831828

diggan 3y ago
It seems like it's your network provider so they have access to your network activity, seems like enough to know if you've watched a video or not. And sure, you can pay and get a better experience, but not sure that's a fair comparison, this is free after all. If you can't afford to pay anything (sometimes people end up in shitty situations), then maybe watching a video for free internet isn't that big of a deal, when the alternative is no internet at all.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Unless this company is targeting the "homeless people who are denied entry at public spaces" market, how hard is it to get access to a free wifi hotspot? Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution? Seriously, what is the audience here?
  - universa1 3y ago
    having this as a backup sounds nice to be honest. getting a sim card in the traveled to country was sometimes a bit of a hassle in the past... nowadays probably not so much. anyways, this might provide the time to get a sim card locally, as those often times used to be a lot cheaper, than some travel sim... and also might provide different coverage provider / network wise, depending which network they roam on...
  - diggan 3y ago
    > Unless this company is targeting the "homeless people who are denied entry at public spaces" market, how hard is it to get access to a free wifi hotspot? There are plenty of places where there are no "free wifi hotspots", like many places that fulfill the extreme "not a city" criteria. Maybe it looks differently where you live, but if I go with my car one hour inland I'll end up in places where I'm sure I wouldn't be able to just find free wifi hotspots everywhere. > Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution? I don't know, ask the company if they're planning to offer a global solution and if they say yes, ask them why? Not sure how that's an argument against the service in the first place...

causality0 3y ago

Still some non-travel potential I think. I might set this up on an old smartphone to keep in my car as an emergency backup, or maybe for avoiding risk to my primary like being on a boat, at the beach, etc.

miki123211 3y ago

I wonder how this works, if your cellular gets deactivated, how do you inform the service that you've watched the ad? Particularly if all you have is an app with no access to low-level system APIs like USSD, texting etc. Is it just disabling your access except to a particular IP range and then enabling it back on receiving a HTTP request? Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Or is it DNS perhaps? That would seem to be the easiest layer to implement this on. I'd really like a technical explanation here.

mbreese 3y ago
> Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Why not? I don’t know how this company actually has things setup, but I suspect you’re right — it’s all done with routing tables. DNS tends to cache too much, and I think DHCP would either be too chatty or also cache too much to be used as a gate keeper. Instead, a firewall/routing approach would make more sense. It would technically be no more difficult than setting up port knocking. Instead of pinging a specific port, you’d watch a video. But other after that, you could just route traffic. What I’d be more interested in knowing is where this filtering is taking place. It would be better done on the phone, to avoid null-routed data going over the network (and costing $/€/etc). So, I’m guessing that it is all done within the eSIM app itself. Maybe something like getting a (signed) token after viewing the video that extends a time limit/expiration for the eSIM itself. Then when the eSIM is expired, it can only communicate with one service — the ad host.
lathiat 3y ago
It’s just the cellular version of a wifi captive portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal Simple version is the network router firewalls traffic to anything except the ad server, and the ad server will have a trigger to change the firewall. There are some technical nuances to how you handle DNS and also redirecting from other web pages (if desired) without breaking things. But that’s the gist of it.
__jonas 3y ago
I'm assuming this would be done by zero-rating their advertising service. They already imply that they restrict traffic on their Free plan to certain services so I would assume they use the same mechanism to allow traffic to pass through their advertising service even when a users free plan has run out. Here is a paper on how websites could be identified for zero-rating: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343966537_Knocking_on_IPs_Identifying_HTTPS_Websites_for_Zero-Rated_Traffic https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343966537_Knocking_... It has a whole list of possible methods.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

That's not what free means. It's cool until you realize that it only exists to take advantage of poor people. If the infrastructure cost was actually important, then they wouldn't serve ads in the first place.

jerbear4328 3y ago
It might target people who can't afford cell service, but I don't see how that's taking advantage of them. Maybe it's profiting off them, but nobody has to use it. If it isn't worth it to you, then don't use it, but if it is, then do, and that's better than if it didn't exist. Nobody is forcing you to use the app, though. What do you mean by infrastructure cost not being important? They either take a loss on the free plan to get downloads, the ads cover the costs and they break even, or they make a profit. All of those options seem fine and potentially sustainable to me (not sure about the loss leader though).
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  It's about backing people into a corner who don't have the means to choose an alternative situation. No one is forcing you to have cell service? Sure they are! Good luck participating in society without it. As for infrastructure costs, that's the entire service. How much does it really cost to provide 300kbit/s? Surely less than it costs to serve ads! Sure, you can turn a profit from the ad revenue, but that means your profit is the end user's attention. My overall point is that we should not call ads "free". Watching ads is labor, and labor ain't free.

unconed 3y ago

If it's ad-supported, it's not free.