DroneCells Available for Purchase!

[airman00]

Hey All,
So I just released the DroneCell at HOPE this past weekend. I also made a cool demo of the DroneCell for the hacker conference:
Easy Button Rig for HOPE 2010 in NYC

They're $100 and come with antenna and antenna cable included. They come preset to 115200 baud and you can easily set it to whatever baud rate you'd like over UART.

Buy it here: http://themakerspace.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=6
Let me know of any cool projects you guys make!

[Razor Concepts]

AWESOME. Any ideas for the best carrier/plan? Unlimited text plans cost a lot 

[SmAsH]

AWESOME. Any ideas for the best carrier/plan? Unlimited text plans cost a lot 

Really? In australia telstra has 1c texts without a plan...

[Razor Concepts]

ONE CENT?? thats like 0.5 cents in USA 

I think over here the cheapest w/o plan is 10 cents through boost mobile... kind of expensive to tinker around with that kind of pricing

[dunk]

so Australia's telco companies were some of the earliest to adopt wireless technologies. this is largely due to the price of maintaining copper networks in a country with a very low population density.

in contrast the US telcos have been some of the worlds slowest to make the switch.
this is strange because the US telcos are fairly up to date with other technologies. (internet connectivity for example.)
the US is catching up now but the figures were very interesting 10 years ago when cell phone adoption in the US was many times lower than that of the rest of the developed world.


so the price is just a function of the length of time the technology has been available.
an SMS is very low bandwidth and costs the telco virtually nothing to send.
the price is set at whatever the market will bear and that will slowly drop over time as the telcos try to attract more customers to their network.

in the EU, depending on what country and your plan text messages are around 2c (euro) with many carriers offering unlimited free texts on certain plans.


what is interesting is many countries in the developing world now have perfectly functional mobile networks which can be maintained far more cheaply than one of our tecos existing networks because they do not have to maintain a whole bunch of legacy copper.


dunk.

[Admin]

In the US, you can get a pre-paid plan. Like 20 cents/message, tops. How many messages do you plan to send, anyway?

I've seen unlimited texting plans for like $10/month that you can cancel anytime.

in contrast the US telcos have been some of the worlds slowest to make the switch.
this is strange because the US telcos are fairly up to date with other technologies. (internet connectivity for example.)

Its the problem of legacy systems - its more profitable to maintain an old system then to throw away everything whenever there is a latest and greatest new technology.

New Yorks subway system is a case in point.

what is interesting is many countries in the developing world now have perfectly functional mobile networks which can be maintained far more cheaply than one of our tecos existing networks because they do not have to maintain a whole bunch of legacy copper.

They also just steal the technology - not paying for research scientists or 'pesky' patents. And quality service isn't included. The employees are dirt cheap, like $2/hour. They spend nothing on safety - the electricians wear a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops while balancing 40 feet up on a handmade bamboo ladder while working on 220V power lines.

I paid less than $5/month for my cell service when in Thailand . . . all the text/voice I needed.

[madsci1016]

because the US telcos are fairly up to date with other technologies. (internet connectivity for example.)

Actually the US scores very poorly when compared globally on internet connectivity speeds/availability.

There's been /. articles on it over the past few years.

But yes, SMS messages uses a side band that was already in existence and cost virtually nothing for a cell network to use. Yet if you compare the average cost per message, and take into consideration the max message size (127 bytes I believe), the cost per byte is twice as expensive as the most expensive satellite internet data plan.