Tactics For Reducing Cellular Data Costs

Today we’re talking about how cellular IoT projects can reduce their data costs. We’re joined by Steve, a Customer Reliability Engineer at Soracom who spends every day working through support tickets submitted by customers. Most of these requests are from customers deploying and supporting their fleets of IoT devices, and Steve has agreed to share his experience. Whether helping configure an APN or troubleshooting modem commands, the reality is that the best-laid plans rarely survive contact with the real world. 

Stay tuned and we’ll dig into the insight and advice from an engineer that specializes in helping people take ownership of their cellular device fleets, eliminate waste, reduce expenses, and streamline their operations. 

Transcript

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Ryan 0:00

Welcome to conversations and connectivity. I'm Ryan Carlson, your host. This is a podcast for IOT professionals and the IOT curious that find themselves responsible for growing executing, or educating others about what to expect when you're connecting products or services to the internet. Today, we're talking about how cellular IOT companies can reduce their data costs. We're joined by Steve, a customer reliability engineer at Soracom. Who spends every day, working through support tickets submitted by customers. Most of these requests are from customers deploying and supporting their very own fleets of IOT devices. And Steve has agreed to share his experiences. Whether helping configure an APN or troubleshooting modem commands. The reality is that the best laid plans rarely survive contact with the real world. Stay tuned and we'll dig into the insights and advice from an engineer that specializes in helping people take ownership of their cellular device fleets, eliminate waste, reduce expenses and streamline their operations. This episode is brought to you by Soracom, a global connectivity provider that companies use to spend less on cellular data services by using less cellular data. Say goodbye to second guessing which carrier gets you the best coverage and get multi-carrier connectivity with automatic fail-over with a single SIM or eSIM. Learn more at Soracom.io. And now under the interview. steve, as a customer reliability engineer, what does your relationship with connectivity look like?

Steve 1:31

Wow, that's a broad so as a customer reliability engineer, my primary relationship with connectivity in my work, Is to assist customers that are having issues with their connectivity, regain connectivity in a way that benefits them. that could be as simple uh, telling a know, here's how you configure a so com APN and data roaming setting so that your card can connect correctly. Or it could go as in depth um, troubleshooting individual modems with at commands In my personal. the connectivity plays a big part in a lot of the tech projects that I do, whether you know, designing Arduino projects with uh, with an ESP8266 that has embedded wifi, um, the, the Soracom onyx dongle uh, grant cellular connectivity to a USB enabled device, like a raspberry Um, to be able to remote into it, in, in whatever location it happens to or if You know, something as simple as I wanna put some new games on my Xbox that I modded, so I'm using file transfer protocol to send them over my local internet instead of having remove, internal components and plug them into my pc.

Ryan 2:46

Sweet, It's way more than just surface deep. oh yeah, I talk about it every once in a while. you're, you're in the trenches on connectivity. So the reason why we're talking is I have a number of questions around costs associated with any sort of iot or connected product project. it wasn't until coming to Soracom that. Started being exposed to questions I'd never thought about in their like duh moments. the big old face palm and the first time was with, solutions Architect Brenna. Someone's was talking about cost and she says, I, he, I'm hearing that cost is really important to you in trying to save some money on your connectivity is important. Yeah. She's so other than outside of just negotiating for lower rates, what if we could make it so you're paying for less data? And that distinction is, in my head, it was like a light bulb. You can pay less for data and you can pay for less data. And it's a nuance that you can have both, right. are some of your thoughts on like, where is it that can achieve cost savings on the connectivity side, and where are some of those non-obvious, ways? and how have you seen that executed or implemented using technology?

Steve 4:22

Yeah, um, I think. when we talk about cost savings in any sort of technology project these days, the first thing that we think about is you designing your backend architecture or your application in general on the Um, if you design an application on the cloud, you know, the common thing that gets explained to people that are unfamiliar with cloud computing is, let's talk like the peaks and valleys of data usage and, hardware if you think target or any other big box retailer, they have consistent business of up and down. It goes up during the holidays, but you have Black Friday and Black their customer base up into the moon before it comes crashing back down immediately the next day. And their computer systems aren't able to keep up with the number of registers going, with the number of transactions occurring during that peak, then everything shuts down. So what do you do? Do you design a system that its top limit is always up at that? Or do you design a system using the cloud that can dynamically allocate resources when that peak occurs, so that you pay for them when you're using them during that peak. And when you just have this regular data usage for the rest of your, the rest of your you're not paying for those high operating

Ryan 5:51

And e-commerce is pretty much the cornerstone of something like AWS instead of having to own the racks of hardware, you now virtualize it and spin more instances of compute or as needed on demand. And then retailers, spin it right back down. So I, I can't think of many iot projects that aren't pretty much cloud native, right? that's where they're going

Steve 6:20

Yeah. I think, I think most projects are in Indeed cloud native at this you know, we're not early on in cloud computing Um, it's something that's widely used and widely accepted as the most viable option when designing an application in terms of hardware management and resource usage.

Ryan 6:39

and things really changed. Like I remember when cloud computing was the thing you would say to make it go. I don't know about that. that's awfully, risky. Putting your data out in the cloud and now the cloud is step one, put your data in the cloud. from government, utilities, even sensitive projects, it's mature enough where, we don't think too hard about that.

Steve 7:01

I thi I think that's just you know, the benefit of cloud's elasticity and its, its ability to allocate resources when needed you know, remove them when unneeded. I don't think there's, there's necessarily much more to unpack there other than you know, example know, if you design a project in traditional computing where you have your own data centers and your own compute know, they always have to be capable of hitting that peak and that incurs much more expense. You're paying for much more expensive and or more Um, whereas if you do it based in the cloud for most of the time, you can be paying less compute, most of the time.

Ryan 7:40

So if there's there, there's. Buckets or different levers that we can pull to control costs. it seems like primary buckets, all with different activities or actions or tactics. If the strategy is. Cost, which I think is every product company ever, there's gonna be the cost of goods, the stuff that you put into the device itself right? So buy expensive components, costs go up. then the software that runs on the hardware. And there I've heard things about what protocols are you using?

Steve 8:12

Yeah. Well, let's talk about protocols know, obviously one of the things that has to be considered when you're designing an IOT project is the communication you know, the set of libraries that you are going to support to transfer data between point A and point I'll use Azure's iot hub as an example because it's what I've been looking at. And when you're uploading files to Azure IoT, they have you select your communication protocol first and they support MQT T, T AMQP, and HTTPS along with MQTT t and AMQP over web sockets. when you look at these know, as someone. isn't on the accounting side of things or is just an engineer, they might only think know, which one best suits use know, is, am I gonna use MQT T T because I want to have a central broker that connects to all my devices and that's the simplest thing Um, am I gonna use AMQP because know, specifically designed for message brokers and it supports queuing and routing of messages. or am I gonna use. HTTP because I want it to be human readable data in a format that I can analyze quickly and easily. Whereas MQTT and AMQP are binary format and are not human readable, when they're being transported. Um, but one of the things we have to consider know, in ascending order those for data because uh, the additional features and the additional readability that gets added, you're If, if I'm not mistaken, being the lowest, then you're gonna AMQP, um, and then you're gonna go up to HTTP. And when you get really early on designing your need to decide which of those you're gonna use. But when you're selecting a communication protocol that at least with Soracom, some of those things you don't have to worry uh, especially in terms of the human reliability of binary data, Soracom has our binary parser, which allows you to trans decode all of that binary to JSON before sending it along to your database or know, other services. So we can take that translation from you, the amount of data you're using on the front end to send that to us, and then transport it in a more readable format off to its end destination without you having to do any sort of that protocol conversion on your own.

Ryan 10:35

my understanding is that the heavier weight, like if you're using https, you know it's gonna have larger headers. And this kind of goes back into the day of the days of like y2k, when you're like accounting characters for your development programs and you're managing the number of bits and bytes that were being transmitted. But now we're at a point where so many devices are rocking huge chip sets, We can just crush anything you want. of these languages are just easier to write with. They can do more heavy lifting. They've got the built in encryption authentication, right? But these are all expensive from a resources perspective to compute with. So if we're talking about a sensor that sits in a farmer's field that needs to run off of a small stack of watch batteries or a nine volt lithium battery of some kind. Well, you want that to last as long as possible, right? And the more you turn on the radio and the more data you're transmitting, the more it drains that or the bigger the processor you need on that little sensor, which means the cost of goods and the

Steve 11:38

Yeah, absolutely. Um, especially, you know, you talk about certain things like headers, and we can use that as an example to give a bit of a idea of what the difference between some of these communication protocols is, which in MQTT, uh, you do have a variable header that isn't always present, but the main header for an MQTT message is only two bytes.. Whereas with HTTP, it's 8,200 roughly. know, you can just see immediately. Okay. Every time I gonna send a message, if I use HTTP as my communication protocol, I'm gonna be using about 4,000 times more data, not including the payload. when, when you state it like that, it becomes a big question of, oh, okay. And then if I scale this out to of know, it becomes this extreme cost saving

Ryan 12:26

let's dissect the moving pieces, the levers that we have to right? So you've got the hardware, you've hardware, the software on the hardware, and then typically on the other end, you've got your. Your cloud platform where your software lives, aws, IOT or Azure iot, or if you're still rockin' Google Cloud for,

Steve 12:44

till next

Ryan 12:44

November, the idea being that you've got the sender and the receiver and you've got data in motion, data at rest, all that fun stuff. But most people think about if you're not using wifi, which you're typically not gonna be bandwidth constrained, but if you're gonna be using cellular, you're just looking at a dumb pipe and it's moving the data. But with Soracom, having virtualized that last mile of infrastructure for cellular connectivity and moving it into the cloud as a next door neighbor you know, your I O T application, they both might live in the cloud, you know, one on a AWS and the other one sitting on its virtual private cloud instance. there's a whole layer of compute that I'm still learning about, hashtag i ot onboarding, I'm still learning about all of these different things that we can do in that translation layer, that transmission layer. And that's where, yourself and the solutions architects keep opening my eyes to new things and the protocol translation was one of em I want to validate. you said that the smaller character counts are not human readable.

Steve 13:50

it's, it's passed in binary.

Ryan 13:52

yep. And then whereas what we like is we like, human readable languages cuz it's easier to diagnose, it's easier to kind of code for some of those things. It doesn't need to be compiled. And if the transmission layer in the. If you're a connectivity provider that's passing the data from the device over the cellular network and while it's in motion if it can translate the binary into Jason and a Hu Human Mach, human readable. that kind of mission accomplished, right? now we can use a lighter weight language on one end, and then give us the desired result on the other. So is protocols the only tool that we have to, adjust some of the cost controls? If we just assume that amount of data transmitted is shows up on your bill, right? Lower. and lower the bill. Are there other areas for cost savings

Steve 14:54

there are some things as a CRE that I point out to customers all the time. one of those, one of those is, We cannot stress enough over and over. the importance of using the Soracom event handler. the Soracom event handler, is something that can really save your bacon, either in testing or production. When you have a device that maybe runs away with an update, you know, for example, early on in my time at Soracom, there was a customer that submitted a ticket because they were using, smart vending machines. Um, and these vending machines had cellular connectivity so that they could monitored for their stocking, and their sales et c. However, this smart vending machine was not configured so that it used wifi to download its updates and its product images. Um, and it downloaded a lot of high quality image files and software updates over the cellular connection, which led to just a simple vending machine using about two and a half gigabytes of data unexpected. Um, and this occurred across several, not all devices, but several devices. let's say you know that your devices are only supposed to use X data a Um, you know that if it's anything more than that, it's something that either should not be occurring, or if it does know, we can put a stop to it and we can go look at it, but it's not going to affect our production. So with Soracom event handler, you can either specify an individual SIM or a group of sims and a data cap for uh, a defined period of time. And when that data cap is hit over that defined period of time, it allows you to take certain actions such as email notification, setting those sims to a suspended status so they're not transmitting any more information until someone manually turns them back on. you could entirely. deactivate those sims. Um, and that prevents any sort of these runaway costs that you may not expect to get. That can happen when you use a pay as yougo service, whether it's Soracom, whether it's aws, et cetera, and it's free event handler is free to use.

Ryan 17:16

but this seems like one of those things that you'd want to built into your software anyways, right? Like you'd want to be looking at usage, looking for anomalous, activities. So if you weren't using Soracom and didn't have an event handler, couldn't I program. Similar functionality into my device you

Steve 17:36

could, however, the first thing that I think of, What if I'm setting this data cap for a collection of devices? Each individual device might not know what the other devices are Um, in which case you would have know, somehow design your software so that all of these devices are communicating with each other to calculate the total data being used. Or if you would have to a communication protocol that supports two-way communications so that wherever the server that is being sent, Uh, is once it recognizes, it reaches that data limit, it would have to send a message back to the devices in order to get them to shut down. Where when you use something like MQTT and it's a pub sub format, that's not always going to be possible.

Ryan 18:21

So I'm hearing that you would need. Carrier itself to be able to report on the activity that's occurring. Just to have each individual device police itself isn't always gonna be the best way to go about it if you're talking about a pool of data

Steve 18:38

Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan 18:39

so outside of things like an event handler, this seems like a, an obvious thing, but if it's a free tool that anyone can, I. to identify when devices go rogue and start running up a What are some of the other tactics that, that you see as a, as someone on a c e side, so as you're looking to people who have deployed in the field, where is it that they're hemorrhaging time, resources, or maybe even cost, runaway devices is hemorrhaging cost. you're paying for the data that you didn't necessarily wanna have to pay. are there people wasting their time or spending time? they'd rather not be

Steve 19:20

yeah, the, the only one that I can really think of off the top of my that isn't widely used by any of our United States customers and and this is a big one for this time saving measure is Soracom Krypton, which is our remote device provisioning Um, if you go back to even you know, before remote device provisioning was you would have to have all this provisioning done in the factory. and and in that case, you need to pay someone to go, you know, you need to pay for their their cost of living while they're there, their travel expenses. You need to have, know, this secure. Like you said, launch codes that can't be leaked anywhere or they could cause significant issues, but with something like Soracom Krypton, you can do on-demand provisioning of credentials and connection destinations based on the Sims authentication, and, and this would be another cost saving measure, instead of having to install a, a hardware security that device uses for authentication, you can use your Soracom SIM in place of a hardware security module.

Ryan 20:24

because it's already, encrypted, authenticated, unique device that has its own built-in security. So you're duplicating effort if you have a connected device that's gonna have cellular. and then you're also having your hardware module. That sounds like just extra effort, extra cost,

Steve 20:46

Yeah, abso absolutely. It's both of those things.

Ryan 20:49

So Krypton would be something that someone needs to know at the time of manufacturing before they start putting the encryption keys

Steve 20:58

Yeah,

Ryan 20:59

IDs onto each

Steve 21:00

they would need to know about it in the planning or testing stage to be able to implement Um, that's not to say that you couldn't stop and change the way that you're producing them once you find out about it, but at that point there are usually deals in place for manufacturing that are too hard to get out uh, to effectively implement something like Krypton.

Ryan 21:19

Okay, so that's gonna be early stage, in your development process. If you Had the ability to snap your fingers and every project just started performing one task before they started, putting things out into the field, if you could just make one change that would make your life a whole lot easier as a customer reliability engineer, what would that change?

Steve 21:46

I think the change that I would is. so that, I guess there are two changes I would make, and one is for in the design stage. And I would say that the most important thing you can do if you're choosing Soracom connectivity connectivity provider, is to get an early conversation with the solutions architect and discuss, here's our plan, here's our proposed project architecture, and then you can. Okay, here's where Soracom Funnel can replace, uh, this part of my architecture, or here's how Soracom Beam can assist me in protocol translation instead of having to do it on the device or in and, and those are things that you have to find out about early on in order to implement them. And what that does for me as a customer reliability engineer is the more of your architecture is within the Soracom bubble before it is you know, the left side in the device or the right side in the. The more I can help support you Um, and the second would be the one that I already mentioned, which is every customer should review and configure event handler for their Um, because that saves me from having to deal uh, runaway costs. It saves me from having to deal uh, unexpected downtime that customers are not informed about in a timely manner. It saves me a lot of those things.

Ryan 23:06

what does that pre-flight checklist look like? If they've got event handler open, nothing's been configured, what is the, what's the bare bones, what would you. what would they, what actions, you've got the infinity gauntlet, you've fingers. you gotta have a lot of things happen here.

Steve 23:21

Yeah. So I. the first thing that I would do is, like we talked about, is set a total, a total data price cap that for all of your sims that says, once all of my sims use this much data, which is is this expensive? When I use Soracom, I want everything to stop or I want to be notified immediately. And that would be the subscriber cumulative traffic rule and event handler set at the, either the operator level or the group level. You can also do it for your individual sims at the subscriber you know, that might be too niche for the kind of rule that we're developing here.

Ryan 24:09

So the group level is I make a product, I sell it to different. Let's say it's supporting retail. Walmart's got my devices target's, got my devices, and each one of them pays me so much money every single month for using my connected product. I could set that spending threshold for each group, the Target group of Sims, the Walmart group of Sims, the Home Depot

Steve 24:33

group of Sims,

Ryan 24:35

And so it's ha, it's also having to understand how your business model functions, right? It's not your total. To the carrier.

Steve 24:44

It's

Ryan 24:44

the usage of a group of sims and understanding the business case there.

Steve 24:49

Yeah. It could be the usage of each client using your product. That's Soracom enabled.

Ryan 24:55

And so I can have them notify me. I can have them shut off or I could do both or, Can you set multiple thresholds? Hit this threshold, send me. Hit a second threshold, throttle

Steve 25:11

Yeah. A absolutely,

Ryan 25:12

one. Shut

Steve 25:14

him. can, you can certainly do Um, it would be instead of a single event handler rule with tears. you can absolutely set up multiple ones for the same group at those different levels that have uh, actions you want to be taken after that threshold is reached.

Ryan 25:30

Okay, so we've got the account wide. Don't make me blow my right? I've budgeted an amount of dollars each month or quarter a year for connectivity. Don't blow that budget. So what is the setting that I would want to put into this event handler to catch a rogue device that gets really expensive fast.

Steve 25:51

Yeah, so there's a couple ways you can there's probably the best way to do it is using the subscriber daily traffic. Which is just going to be a rule that executes when a subscriber's daily data usage exceeds a specified Um, you could also do it at the monthly level, or you could do it at the lifetime Um, at this point there's no, I don't believe there's any wiggle room between day and month. You can't do it at a week. It would have to be daily or Um, but that would be the rule that you want.

Ryan 26:22

I'm, I'm guessing that a daily rule, if my goal was to catch something that goes wrong, I want to catch

Steve 26:33

it

Ryan 26:33

yesterday, not 30 ago.

Steve 26:37

Yeah, because you might know device is gonna use maybe between 750 megabytes and a gigabyte this month, but I don't wanna shut it off at a gigabyte because you that could halt my product. But I know that this device should never use more than 500 megabytes in a day. I can set that daily rule at 500 megabytes and know, notify me so that I can investigate this before it gets any worse.

Ryan 27:02

Can I set up different email accounts? Product support team gets notified if a device exceeds even like we'll take, the maximum amount. We would really expect any device to be used in a day and then add 20%, or even just set that amount and say, I just wanna be notified. I won't shut it off, but email this support team or this central email address. Whereas the monthly cap, which might have to do more their plan or financing or whatever that. I have a different team. Get notified. can there be multiple

Steve 27:36

absolutely. You use multiple email addresses for a single rule. You can create a s a multiple rules that each have their own email address specified for who should be Um, and if you want to, you can even use a web hook as your notification, so those those notifications get posted into a Slack channel for.

Ryan 27:55

Oh, that's awesome. Okay. I just, it's almost if millions of developers were screaming out in joy, Well, thank you for taking some time. this is good. There's some key takeaways here, Yeah. thanks Steve. I

Steve 28:08

Yeah. Happy to help Ryan.

Ryan 28:11

All

Steve 28:11

right I'll catch you later. Bye-Bye.

28:14

So did you like the interview? If so, go ahead and leave a review, give it stars. Like, and subscribe. Whatever it is, the platform does it. You're listening to this podcast on, we truly appreciate it. this wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for our sponsor, uh, thus podcast is brought to you by Soracom, a cellular network provider built specifically for supporting IOT devices with a reliable connectivity across urban and rural areas around the world. Now, if you're not happy with the cellular service that you've got going on today, experience multi-carrier coverage that benefits from automatic fail over from a single SIM or eSIM. Soracom's network as the top choice for intelligent device deployments, interested in either conserving cellular data use, just as we heard in this interview or enabling secure private networks, which is similar to having your own private APN with Soracom but, it takes minutes to set up not the three to 12 months that it can take through the larger carriers and better yet. It's actually all at a fraction of a cost. This is all possible because cloud engineers and cellular network engineers at Soracom, put their heads together. To virtualize the packet, routing Howard hardware. How do I, that's responsible for managing and routing data traffic off of a carrier cellular network and moving it all up into the cloud on AWS. So this radically changes, not only how data can be controlled and delivered, but it means it's possible to enable secure two-way private networking without expensive per SIM fees or restrictive contractual commitments. I believe it or not, it takes. Dozens of work orders, tens of thousands of dollars and a significant amount of time in order to set up your own private APN with a larger carrier, but just like you can spin up an e-commerce website that scales from one to a million customers on black Friday. That same scaling technology has been applied to that back end, which is what Soracom did. Now it does sound a little bit too good to be true. Right. Well, you know, it actually is. Almost better than that. There's no commitment to build out your own secure network over cellular with features and administrative control that far exceeds what you'd get from a private APN through a single carrier. You can securely transmit device data across multiple carriers for any device with a Soracom SIM even devices already deployed in the field can be added to your virtual private network was zero touch provisioning after the fact. You can deploy devices and then add them. That's huge. Normally you'd have to get hands on that device and you'd need to put their credentials on that device in order to add them to a private APN or part of a VPN network. So for those that have experienced setting up a VPN over cellular, you actually know how big of a deal. This is. We're the first to admit that this is super complicated stuff. Security in general is because it's important, but what's great is how the Soracom platform makes the process incredibly simple. It is a complex problem, but the process to get it set up is several mouse clicks away. Is your application already securely hosted using an AWS virtual private cloud. Good news. Do you already have the credentials? All right. You got what you need. If so, then everything you have is in your control. You can now add devices with a Soracom SIM to your secure network. Using VPC peering that virtual private cloud peering Basically it makes to secure clouds within AWS. Talk to one another. So, whether you're on Microsoft Azure or you're maintaining your own corporate cloud or on-premise servers, Soracom's underlying virtual private gateway services takes out the cost and the complexity of setting up a VPN over cellular. Now leading companies, trust Soracom to connect their IOT devices, to cloud platforms, to secure corporate networks around the globe. So wherever your deployments take, you experienced cellular connectivity, built for IOT without a contract. At Soracom.io, signing up for an operator account takes less than a minute and you can buy your own Soracom. IOT optimized, Sims or embedded eSIMs directly from your user console, or you can check out our global channels. like Digi-Key, Mouser electronics, Cal chip connect. You can buy these things directly through them. They also have a USB Onyx. modem it's a 4g LTE. modem that you can get. Uh, and there's also the new magic button and by magic button, it's an LTE-m button, One of the podcasters from Stacey on IOT called it the Amazon dash button on steroids. one last thing. If you check out the website and decide you want to talk to someone on Soracom's team. whether it's with a conductivity experts that can take you on a deep dive. Talk about what you're looking for. Talk about your projects. If you heard about Soracom here on the podcast. Please leave a note in the contact us form under where did you hear about Soracom, we would greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Take care.