NEW Connected Car DATA SIM

[Driver Dave]

I'd be interested once my "3" sim comes to it's end. How soon do you think you will be in a position to offer these and at what sort of price?

[smj1873]

Originally Posted by Driver Dave

I'd be interested once my "3" sim comes to it's end. How soon do you think you will be in a position to offer these and at what sort of price?

We should be good to release soon and pricing depends on how much initial Data you'd take. I have looked at the whole of the market and I'm confident our pricing is cheaper than anything out there. There's a discount for higher amounts of Data taken as our costs go down on higher Data and the advantage to you in this is the fact that every single MB of Data you don't use will be available to you for as long as you have the SIM. Other providers will have cut off points or round you down to the nearest GB.

[apnicolle]

How much is how much ?
It seems many people use less than 1Gb a month, whereas others like me use 15-20Gb, mainly Netflix/YouTube/Music on the school run.

[filace]

Sounds interesting, but no mention of price yet? There are a myriad of companies offering rebadged M2M SIMs from the various retailers (I assume this is essentially what you'll be offering - I guess the fact that you have a choice of carrier means you're reselling a service from another org rather than obtaining a partner agreement directly with the MOs).

My plan is to get a 3 SIM with 12/24GB data (30 or 50 quid each, ish) and use one of them - they're also available on Amazon and easy to swap in and out so I'm intrigued as to what your 'value add' would be here - you mention issues with bandwidth and contention in your first posting but actually most of the issues are at the radio layer rather than Internet backhaul so not sure how you're planning to handle that - unless you go for a multi-network SIM I suppose (which would push the price waaay up over the 3 offering).

[smj1873]

Originally Posted by filace

Sounds interesting, but no mention of price yet? There are a myriad of companies offering rebadged M2M SIMs from the various retailers (I assume this is essentially what you'll be offering - I guess the fact that you have a choice of carrier means you're reselling a service from another org rather than obtaining a partner agreement directly with the MOs).

My plan is to get a 3 SIM with 12/24GB data (30 or 50 quid each, ish) and use one of them - they're also available on Amazon and easy to swap in and out so I'm intrigued as to what your 'value add' would be here - you mention issues with bandwidth and contention in your first posting but actually most of the issues are at the radio layer rather than Internet backhaul so not sure how you're planning to handle that - unless you go for a multi-network SIM I suppose (which would push the price waaay up over the 3 offering).

Thanks for your comments and questions.

In reply, we have direct relationships with EE, O2 and Vodafone with absolutely no third party involvement.

We also have multi-network offerings and on our pricing it's not a massive price jump but is certainly more expensive than single network SIM's.

The value add in our SIM's is ultimately our infinite flexibility. We can do any network, any SIM size with any amount of Data for any length of term.

Ideally, our concept is to provide our SIM's to a dealer and have it in the car from delivery to the customer. Posting in this forum is partly to get in touch with more dealers and to give fellow Volvo owners the option of what I see as a better deal than what we've had so far.

I'll update everyone this week with full pricing and hopefully a timescale for orders. This post was to really get a feel for the appetite for the idea.

[Paul Wildsmith]

I suggest if your marketing is intended to be through dealers, then you'd be best talking to Volvo UK (as you may well be doing so). I suspect most people on this Forum won't be going back to our dealer to source a SIM.

[smj1873]

Originally Posted by Paul Wildsmith

I suggest if your marketing is intended to be through dealers, then you'd be best talking to Volvo UK (as you may well be doing so). I suspect most people on this Forum won't be going back to our dealer to source a SIM.

Paul, I'll make the website accessible for everyone who wants one or wants to have a look and order one. Ultimately if it's supplied at a dealer then it's great but I'd expect not everyone wants to go through that route and there will be plenty of us who would rather just buy on our own. Many of the online leasing deals are through brokers and customers never go near a dealer so I'd be naive to think dealers are the one stop shop.

[streetg]

Interesting concept!

Keen to hear how you can avoid congestion on the networks? Are you rolling out your own network and masts? I guess not so I am assuming you are still using the mobile operators radio networks in the UK, therefore I do not understand how you can avoid congestion, if the cell site is full then its full no matter what you have in the core???

[steadvex]

Is there a website for this company?

I can't decide if i'm interested or not, so far the only use I see for it is the internet radio in the car, mines the earlier sensus mind, so far I use it with bluteooth tethering on the phone but reception can be a bit flaky.

Can't decide if the car is worth spending money on, been looking at preloaded data sims, the 12gb for 12 months for around £30 that you can find on amazon/ebay seems good, but its another cost ontop of VoC when my phone already does it? hard to justify

[smj1873]

Originally Posted by streetg

Interesting concept!

Keen to hear how you can avoid congestion on the networks? Are you rolling out your own network and masts? I guess not so I am assuming you are still using the mobile operators radio networks in the UK, therefore I do not understand how you can avoid congestion, if the cell site is full then its full no matter what you have in the core???

We have a direct relationship with each of the main networks and our SIM's are run on a rivate network that is infinitely scalable. It's not shared with the main network and as such there are no contention or congestion issues.