Data Usage
Pay as you go data usage
At Simbase, all data usage is billed in a Pay As You Go model (PAYG). This means that you are only charged for the data that was consumed by your hardware. There are several benefits to using a pay-as-you-go data plan:
Flexibility: Quite often, we see that our customers find it hard to estimate data usage beforehand. To make your job easier, simply pay for the data that was consumed by your hardware.
Cost-effectiveness: With pay-as-you-go, you only pay for the data you use. This allows you to have more control over your data usage and budget.
No commitment: If you (temporarily) take your device out of service, your data expenses automatically reduce to zero. And since our data rates are up to 90% cheaper than our competitors, you get the lowest rate even if you just use 1MB.
Billing process
Data usage of your SIM cards is not billed in real time. Below you can find the steps in the billing process.
Your device connects to a network
The roaming partner starts a log of the data session
Your device sends and receives data
The data session is closed when any of the following events occur:
The device closes the data session
The device connects to another roaming partner
The roaming partner logs the total data consumed in the data session
The roaming partner rounds the total used data up to increments of 1kb
The roaming partner sends the log to Simbase.
Simbase calculates the costs of the consumed data and deducts the amount from your balance.
Considerations
Billing is not a real-time process. Data usage is billed, only when the log file from the roaming partner is received by Simbase.
All data sessions are rounded up, to increments of 1kb. If your device consumes 234 bytes in a data session, 1kb (or 1024 bytes) is billed.
When calculating charges for data usage, the costs are adjusted to four decimal points. As a result, any amount that is less than 0.0001 is automatically increased to 0.0001.
When the device is programmed to never close a data session, the roaming partner eventually will force the device to start a new data session. This is normal behavior but is sometimes not taken into consideration by hardware developers.
1 gigabyte = 1024 megabyte = 1048576 kilobyte = 1073741824 bytes
Although signaling traffic is not billed, a mobile device typically generates a little overhead data usage. You could think of TCP/UDP handshakes, ping, encryption, etc. This traffic is billed.
Both inbound and outbound data usage is billed.
When you deploy a public IP address on your SIM and open the firewall, any traffic sent by a user to your device is billed.
How to download a usage specification
Downloading a CSV file of the IoT SIM's usage from the Sim Management Platform allows you to access and analyze detailed information regarding the SIM card's activity and data consumption.
Go to the Sim Management Platform and log in to your account.
On the right side click on ‘Sim cards’ and go to ‘Usage’ tabs
On the lower right, click the ‘Export’ button.
An Excel file will be generated. Click on the Excel file on the lower left to download the file.
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