Ideally you'd get a dedicated M2M MVNO operator who'll sell you a whole stack of them. If you just want one, you'll have to do a lot of price comparison; Three UK have some nice deals where you can use inclusive minutes/data in some non-EU countries as well as the standard EU free roaming.

Thanks for the MVNO keyword, it led me to a few interesting offerings I didn't know existed in my local market.

I did some price comparisons and found that unless I'm in different countries every month or I have a hard requirement on using the same number globally, it's much, much cheaper to just get a disposable local SIM card every time I travel.

You can use Asterisk & call using SIP to always have the same number.

You don't even need Asterisk. Twilio now supports SIP registration and is much easier to manage than maintaining your own Asterisk.

Does anybody know of one that doesn't charge a monthly fee? I have a product idea where I'd like to use mobile data as a backup in case of wifi network failure. So I'm willing to pay a higher per-MB fee if I can avoid a monthly per-SIM fee.

Twilio charges a relatively low monthly fee per SIM, starting at $2/mo. See: https://www.twilio.com/wireless/pricing

That is relatively low, but definitely not low enough in my case. The price point I'm thinking of is ~$25/year; giving 96% of my revenue to Twilio would not work. The device in question would be on wifi, so I really only need the mobile data to communicate in the rare event of wifi failure. And even then I don't need much data.

Have you checked https://hologram.io/iot-sim-card/ ?

With global roaming? Maybe something like knowroaming, $8 for a day's unlimited data in 100+ countries. Not much good if you want to use 100kbytes a day, but for your use case it might work

https://www.knowroaming.com/order/data-packages/160-global-u...

Roaming isn't necessary. And I want to use something like an average of 100kB per year, with many devices having a long period of no transmission (and being off network if that helps).

Can you not use a PAYG sim? In the UK Three will give you a sim you have to use once every 6 months (a ping would do), charge £1 per megabyte.

If you happen to use Project Fi for your phone service, you can get up to 10 data sims for no monthly cost, and data just comes out of your main bucket. Obviously not a solution for non-personal projects.

unfortunately, no carrier will do this. I suspect that this is because of administrative fees associated with simply allocating a phone number and the network overhead from having a device associate with cell towers when idle.

You don't need a phone number if you don't need to be called on one, and you don't even need to be actively tracked in the home location database if you don't need to be reached at low latency at all. Think low latency=incoming call, no loner low latency=hourly email check. The remaining overhead is just renewing the sim once it degrades and keeping database space to allow it to associate if it turns the gsm module on.

I'm pretty sure all registered SIMs (even data-only) on a carriers network get an allocated phone number -- at least that's what I'd always thought.

Is it possible for a SIM card to not have a phone number? My iPad has a SIM card for cellular data and it has a phone number even though it doesn't have a phone app.

That would be ideal in my case. It's data only and I'd be happy to leave the GSM module off 99% of the time if that made things cheaper.

See https://www.quora.com/Do-all-SIM-cards-come-with-a-phone-num... for someone who seems to know a little more than I do telling us that the number is not necessary for the card to work.

Knowroaming.com Essentially worldwide coverage, cheap rates, unlimited plans as well, no monthly fee, and only kicks in when you need it :)

Are you sure about that? As far as I can tell, the plans are all for limited periods.

Yup. You can purchase unlimited packages in a large selection of countries. Been using the service for years now. Amazing. And no need to swap Sims, or replace your home sim

There are a few: Freedompop, Truphone, Tello. But they all have minimum activity requirements so they wouldn't necessarily work as a backup.

Hologram.io is a $1.50 a month fee, but it is suited much more to IoT global roaming

At least in the EU, AldiTalk offers 4G LTE with plans of up to 5.5 GB for 12.99€ / month[1]. I am not sure, though, what is the price per MB when a stork leaves the EU.

[1] https://www.alditalk.de/internet-flat-xl

Most, if not all, EU carriers (I assume including this one, but don’t speak German) have a limit of how long you can actually be outside your home country. After that period they either terminate your contract or withdraw the free EU roaming (which is perfectly legal per the regulations).

"Complying countries: in major EU countries like the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Cyprus, Malta and Greece there is a general adoption of the principle without any limitations or FUPs on almost all prepaid plans offered."[1]

[1] http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/European_Union#A...

Yeah, basically you'll have to make the stork sign the form that makes him accept the international roaming charges when leaving EU territory.

Don't forget that in some countries, the stork's ID card is required to activate the SIM card before use.

The actual data plan price listed there is 14.99, sorry to say. (2.99€ is for the sim card.)

All providers/plans here (Finland) provide near-global non-free roaming. Is it different where you live?

My provider lists ~190 roaming countries, not counting satellite/planes/ships, on their roaming rates page: https://elisa.fi/puheliittymat/kaytto-ulkomailla/

> Is it different where you live?

Yes, generally you have to activate intl roaming ~a week before you travel, by talking to a customer support agent on the phone, and it's limited to specific regions at a time. It's also ridiculously expensive.

The previous owner's migratory patterns likely made international roaming non-optional in this case.

I use FlexiRoam which gives me ~$30/GB that works in almost any country - everyone I’ve travelled to so far. On the same recharge and SIM card. It also sticks onto your existing sim and lets you software switch between your existing sim and the flexiroam.

They also have country specific plans which are cheaper for some specific destinations. I’ve not tried those but I’ve gone through about 25GB of data over 2 years of the global plans in probably 10+ countries.

Obligatory referral link which gives you 100MB free data. Though worth searching sometimes travel sites have a promo code that’s good for 500MB or more free: http://roam.my/LATHIAT

>> ~$30/GB

Does that include Canada? That is about HALF the advertised rates where I am. The real rates, after all the fees, are inevitably higher. Please send a few storks my way.

https://www.telus.com/en/bc/mobility/plans/

Is there a particular reason that BC has obscenely expensive phone plans?

For comparison:

I used to get a Spotify subscription, unlimited calling and SMS, and 1.5 GB of data for $30 in New Zealand. I now currently get 12 GB and unlimited calling+SMS for $40 in Australia.

Because we are too Canadian. We are too polite. We don't complain. We tend to just accept things. And there is little competition. So large corporations push consumers around.

Canada looks like 5GB/25USD.

byob in bc. 80$/month for 1gb/month, advertised price.

*While some countries have vastly cheaper data. Some do not and also if you go to lots of destinations the “starter park” / SIM card cost can outweigh the cost difference easily. Which is why it easily made sense to me.

Also saves you trying to find one at the airport (strangely not always possible) and also gives you coverage when at transit airports (flying from Australia to varios destinations I almost always have a few hours transit somewhere in the middle)

If you’re in a country with easily accessible cheaper data for long enough (eg the UK has really cheap travel sims) you could always switch for that trip.

Do you know what carrier they use in the United States? $40/10GB seems pretty good to me.

That's probably what they were paying. They probably used a very efficient protocol to keep bandwidth consumption low.

Here in Japan, an attendant at the local meetup works for a company that does just that:

https://soracom.io/en/

I thought this is just normal thing, that you can bring your SIM card anywhere and it will just work. Prices are different thing.

The device could be optimized to send the data only when connected to a low-cost network, or send just general data at very low frequency when on high-cost network, just to know the device is alive.

Also getting a cheap plan on data but expensive on calls should be also possible.

I believe twilio has a SIM product now. https://www.twilio.com/wireless

Huh, that seems pretty decent. $2/mo/sim is a bit expensive though. Almost competitive with Worldsim for small amounts of data.

Your question is a contradiction, no? As you imply, most SIMs will work just about anywhere, they'll just charge you an obscene amount for the privilege.

If you want cheap international telephony, there's a whole industry for travel SIMs, but they're often still pretty expensive to use in some countries.

The researchers' real mistake was using a contract SIM. Should have used a prepaid one.

Interesting, i have never thought that this is a problem as my telco covers calls/sms in 207 countries and data in 174 countries, you just have to have the correct phone plan (there are 3 groups of countries with different price for data starting from 100MB to 1GB for 15 days at 13EUR)

I use https://www.bnesim.com/ for a SIM card for my 4G hotspot. They charge €19 a GB in 64 countries, including China, Japan, and most of Europe.

Maybe worth looking into how Amazon Kindle solved it years ago? They offered free GSM/3G? access to the internet, something like 150MB/monthly, unlimited access to Wikipedia, in so many countries, basically everywhere.

And car companies presumably have global agreements e.g. I can drive my car across Europe and have all the navigation related stuff continue to work.

But easier for Amazon or big car company to broker such an agreement. I think the question is how would Joe Public get something like this.

>I can drive my car across Europe and have all the navigation related stuff continue to work.

Well, since a year or two EU-wide free roaming is a thing.

How many of those navigation systems use the internet though? Most consumer grade car navigation systems use offline maps.

I was thinking the same as I typed the comment but my assumption is that there has to be some kind of mobile data because of #1 live traffic updates & #2 map updates.

On #1 comment below says this is done by radio RDS

On #2 however there has to be a way to update the maps in the car as roads (new roads, closures, lane changes, speed limits, etc.) change. My assumption was that car makers hardly expect people to manually update these maps. And likewise could probably not live with the liability of years old data in the maps. But looks like I may be incorrect here http://updateportal.skoda-auto.com

BMW at least have actual SIM cards in the cars so original point stands.

Many of them (at least in cars < 5 years old) that I've used have had some kind of real-time traffic/congestion/construction info built into the system. I guess these use some kind of internet based communication?

Radio, actually: https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-does-live-traffic-on-...

You can get emergency beacon devices for hiking and sailing that also work globally.

Do these use a SIM card? Thought they were satellite. That's what the first thing I googled seemed to agree with too ( https://www.yachtingworld.com/features/epirbs-plbs-and-man-o... ).

Yes, wouldn't be good in an emergency when out trekking if it needed a nearby base station!

They use a mix of satellite and ground radio (satellite to get the SOS out and a rough location, then radio to actually locate you)

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_locator_beacon

There are lots of types that work in different ways however. E.g. For marine use we use VHF radios with digital functionality. There's a big red 'distress' button that will transmit your vessel information and position to the coastguard. That's all done via radio, no satellites. (You then back it up with a very analogue mayday call)

They work via satellites e.g. SPOT Gen3 or Garmin InReach.

Get GoogleFI - $10/GB worldwide

Only if you live in the US