>The challenge is or is going to be when (unless they already do) TVs start embedding 4G/5G SIM cards into the TV to bypass such requirements.

Are the cellular providers going to give free cellular access to these manufacturers or something? Consumers aren't going to pay for that. No one's going to buy a TV that requires an additional $30/month for a data plan.

Consumers won't have to pay, just like consumers today don't pay for various web based services such as email, search, social media and others. It is subsidized by the revenue the TV companies make from selling your data.

Today that revenue subsidizes the cost of the TV itself, the additional cost of 4G/5G based service for small bits of data is not much. Other options can be LoRaWAN, NB-IoT or other such services since the data transferred is going to be small, primarily analytics. All of these are pretty cheap both to embed in the TV as well as the service, especially at scale.

I guess I'm assuming here that the amount of data needing to be passed over-the-air will be quite large, since people are talking about these devices listening to your conversations and such. Some simple analytics data like what channel you're watching doesn't require any bandwidth, but sending microphone stream to a server to be analyzed and run through a voice-recognition program will add up.

> Are the cellular providers going to give free cellular access to these manufacturers or something? Consumers aren't going to pay for that. No one's going to buy a TV that requires an additional $30/month for a data plan.

I actually wouldn't be surprised in the least if this became commonplace down the road. Just open up your new telescreen and bam it seemlessly connects to the 5G/wireless network without issue. You'll get every update, ad, tracking, software automatically pushed to the machine without the need for the user to intervene.

My problem with this idea is that there's limited data bandwidth on the cellular network, even with 5G (5G has especially poor range, as I understand, so you have to have a tower very close by). If the TV makers can keep the overall data usage very low, it could work, but the stuff you're talking about seems like it'll require a pretty large data budget, and I just don't see how all this surveillance is going to be so profitable that it would pay for the cellular service and still net a handsome profit for the TV maker.

I mean, I have a TomTom satnav that has a built-in sim to download latest traffic updates and sync with my TomTom account. The device was about £250 when I got it 5 years ago and there is no subscription to pay at all, it has "lifetime"* always-on connection. So I can't be that expensive, or TomTom would be losing money by now.

*lifetime - defined as "lifetime of the device", whatever that means. 5 years in and it still works fine.

The mfgr must have negotiated something with one of the cellular carriers to give them unlimited access for a fee, with the stipulation that it's only used for these occasional OTA updates which really don't use much data.

However, I must point out that a satnav device's occasional updates, as I said, don't use much data: just a multi-megabyte download every few months at most. But streaming constant surveillance data from a TV to the "mother ship" is going to require far more data than that. Multiply this by an average of 1-3 TVs per household, and this seems like a big load on the cellular system.

I hope you're right. I'm also fortunately in a position to have access to radio gear that would let me sniff that out and apply copper foil tape until it's fixed.

Care to share more on the copper foil tape thing?

Did you mean wrap the antenna or something like that? I don't have radio equipment but would love to know more.

It's used a lot in ham radio for grounding and such, but it's also great for making an impromptu Faraday cage around an antenna. For example: https://www.amazon.com/Bertech-Copper-Conductive-Yards-Thick...

Note: that's expensive AF. I probably wouldn't literally use it to block the signal when a thin steel piece would probably work just as well. But it's an example of something you absolutely could do: find out where the antenna is, then severely interrupt its signal.