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I think it's pretty obvious that they're not trying to compete in cost per GB. The point is that if you're running a sensor that phones home once a day, you probably have less than 1MB's worth of data to send per month anyway, so your total cost with Spark is $3, whereas for Ting it would be $9. That the Ting option comes with 99 more megabytes is immaterial if you don't have 99 megabytes' worth of stuff to send.

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Price per GB is not their main concern, but it's still pretty amazing that the price is far more than ten times higher than it could be.

I'm just pointing out that while this is about as good as you can get for 1MB, if you need perhaps 5MB there are better options, and god help you if you try to use 20MB on this plan.

You're treating it as if transfer is the only cost associated here. Every one of these lines requires consuming a telephone number, which is a fixed cost passed down from the MVNO

That's the $3 part.

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