My question relates to monitoring an IoT device in a remote location where there is no local ISP. The specific need right now is monitoring our smart thermostat in a remote cabin location so that it can advise our user of a power failure or a temperature drop. The area does have good LTE coverage from a local cell phone tower. We believe that the solution would involve a wireless router which supports LTE through a SIM card to maintain a persistent connection which our customer could then monitor as they now monitor our devices on their home network. This is getting into an area outside our experience though. Are there factors or limitations which would affect what router/SIM card would be needed? Obviously we just need data not minutes and very little data at that for our one device. I suppose the SIM card would have to be activated by the company with the local cell phone tower? Would that activation require a cell phone number? Hopefully not as we don't want a call-up connection, we want a persistent connection so our device can send out an alert on set triggers.
Is this as simple as we hope: the user gets just any wireless router with a SIM slot, inserts a pay-as-you-go SIM card from some local provider (Fido, Virgin etc.) with a couple GB of data added to it, the router connects to the tower and establishes the local wireless network, the user connects our device and his cell phone to the network, our client software on the cell phone connects to our device through the network and then once our monitoring software knows the device's IP address it's done and our client drives back to the city? Maybe the data has to be topped up from time to time. Generally does data expire?
Some advice would be appreciated. We have a question to answer and not a lot of time to research it in-house.
Is this as simple as we hope: the user gets just any wireless router with a SIM slot, inserts a pay-as-you-go SIM card from some local provider (Fido, Virgin etc.) with a couple GB of data added to it, the router connects to the tower and establishes the local wireless network, the user connects our device and his cell phone to the network, our client software on the cell phone connects to our device through the network and then once our monitoring software knows the device's IP address it's done and our client drives back to the city? Maybe the data has to be topped up from time to time. Generally does data expire?
Some advice would be appreciated. We have a question to answer and not a lot of time to research it in-house.
