I think I failed to convey my point clearly. My point is that if you need a separate sim per IoT device, the (possibly monthly) cost of a sim and number will greatly exceed the cost of messages sent.
That makes sense. The provider incurs an ongoing (trivial to them in bulk) cost for leasing you the number so they can’t let them go stale - although three months is definitely more than lining their pockets. My VoIP provider charges a fixed 99c/month for each unique phone number. 15 € for three months is cheap for personal purposes when you have just a few in the field but isn’t sustainable for large scale deployment. I continue to be impressed by what can be accomplished in the 915 MHz ISM band; it’s not LoRaWan proper but you can achieve non-line-of-sight communication over a hundred and fifty miles (at obviously incredibly slow bitrates) with some signal conditioning magic. It would be amazing to spread a network of these around the world to enable constant low-bitrate communication without a base rate for pure pay-as-you-go options.
