We had our OVMS on our AT&T family plan for $10 per month plus $2/MB. That gave me unlimited text messages and netted out around $17 per month on average. I use between 100 and 250 text messages per month, and that spiked up to 500 on months when I've been working on the firmware. So that was an OK deal and very convenient to have it billed with our family plan. When we switched to using one of the new shared data plans, the deal got better for our phones but the OVMS bill went up to $25/month (which included sharing in the now gigantic shared data pool). Cathy spent a bunch of time trying to get help from AT&T to put OVMS on anything cheaper than a smartphone plan, but couldn't make any progress.
So, I decided it was time to switch to something else. I tried to get a AT&T GoPhone plan, but none of the currently available plans were significantly better than the $25/month plan. Even the "no data" plans were too expensive to justify switching.
So, Cathy started doing research and found a couple of providers that sell cell service which uses the AT&T network and suit how OVMS uses cell service:
H20 Wireless and
Air Voice Wireless. Analyzing our text and data usage, she decided we could use the H2O Wireless prepaid plan and end up spending under $10 per month, about $90 per year. Air Voice Wireless has a monthly plan that gives you text messages for $0.02 and data at $0.066/MB, with a $10 monthly minimum.
We decided to try H20, partly because we expect it will be a little bit cheaper and partly because Cathy found it first and I started working on getting an H2O SIM. Cathy reports that Air Voice Wireless seems to have a better reputation for both quality of service and customer support. They are definitely worth a try.
You can order an H20 SIM directly from their web site for $10, plus $10 for the first chunk of service. It looks like the shipping will be free until after you put in your credit card, then it's crazy ($26 for the default shipping method and $15 for the cheapest/slowest, as I recall). You can also buy them locally, at Target, etc., and save the shipping charge. I was all ready to do that, when Cathy found you can order
H20 SIMs from Amazon for $0.01 with free shipping. Really, one penny and no shipping!
I got it yesterday. It works. Here are the step-by-step instructions:
1. Order an
H20 SIM from Amazon for $0.01 with free shipping.
2. When you get the SIM, go to the H2O wireless site, create an account (click on log in, then "not registered yet? click here"), then
activate your SIM card. All you need for the activation is the ActFast code from the back of the SIM carrier card. That will assign you a phone number.
Write it down from the bottom of the activation page, as I have found no way to look it up. That wouldn't be an issue with an actual phone, but not knowing the phone number would present problems with OVMS.
3. Install the SIM in the OVMS device.
4. Confirm it works by sending it a text message, STAT for example. If your OVMS was previously set up for a different network, you'll get back the usual response. If not, you'll get a "permission denied" message. If that's the case, go through the
normal setup process.
5. When you get to configuring for network data: the
configuration information for the H2O network boils down to one OVMS setup command:
That's it! It was a little wonky right after I configured it until it did a self-reboot. Perhaps it had problems switching from the old AT&T configuration to the H2O setup. So, I'd recommend a power cycle after setting the network configuration. It seems very responsive, although I am seeing a fair number of broken pipe messages on the server, although I'd occasionally see clumps of those messages when on the AT&T plan.
That all said, the jury is still out on this experiment. There are two issues.
Issue #1: I see that I've used up $1.26 of my initial $10.00 payment. I've used about 20 text messages, so that's $1.00. It's hard to know the exact count because some messages apparently didn't go through. That's way over my average daily rate. It's possible that those "broken pipe" messages mean OVMS has to keep making new connections, which drive up data usage. It will take at least a few days of normal use to see if the billing is what I expect.
Issue #2: Their web site security is horrifying. When I set up my account, I generated a cryptographically random 20-character password. It worked great until I tried to log in later. I couldn't understand why the password I recorded wasn't working, so I went through the "I forgot my password" process. They sent me a crazy-looking password in plain text email, and didn't force me to reset it (security problem #1, force good security). I couldn't see how to reset my password (security problem #2, don't make good security hard). To change your password, go to "update information," then look for the "change password" button next to the submit button. When I went to record the random password they sent me, I noticed it was the first 10 characters of the password I gave them. So, they just silently truncate super secure passwords to weak passwords (security problem #3, don't force poor security and terrible UI on your users). All of that is bad, but the implied security problem #4 is far worse: they store user passwords in plain text. That mistake is what gets you into the headlines when someone hacks your site and steals all of your users' passwords.
Warning Do not give these idiots a password you use anywhere else. I'm also a little nervous about letting them store my credit card info.
I'm definitely interested to see how well the cheap
Air Voice Wireless monthly plan compares. If someone gives them a try, let us know.
Update 11/17/2014: Six months in and it's working very well. The service has been reliable and it's costing just $10 every 90 days, so just over $40/year. Today I checked the balance: $6.91 with 4 days to go before the current expiration date, so I had plenty of bandwidth left over for more data and text messages. As an experiment, I recharged it early and was pleased to see the new expiration date (2/19/2015) is 90 days after the old expiration date (11/21/2014), not 90 days after the recharge. It's good to know I don't have to wait until the last minute to recharge.
