Reply To: Typical Mayfly Data Usage

Data plan prices are kind of a hard thing to put an exact total on, since it varies depending on various factors the station owner can choose, like cell carrier and transmitting interval, but I can give example costs for our typical configurations and deployments.  For example, most of our stations transmit around 10 parameters every 5 minutes, using Hologram cards on Digi LTE modules.  That results in an approximate usage of 12MB of data per month.  We use the Maker Edition Flexible Data plan from Hologram, which is $0.40 per MB, plus $0.60/month base cost, resulting in around $5.40 per month.  But that’s only for Hologram cards, using LTE modules.  If you use 2G boards, the cost is a few dollars higher per month due to the slightly larger data usage that 2G modules seem to use.  (2G will be sunsetted soon in the US, so we’re upgrading all our stations to 4G LTE).  So essentially the Maker Flexible, pay-as-you-go plan that Hologram offers will result in around $5-8 per month of data usage.  There are other SIM card providers out there that some people are using with Mayfly loggers that I think cost more than that.  We haven’t found anything cheaper or easier to use than Hologram, which is why we recommend them.