Netbiter Data Usage Explanations

Hello,

We have a customer with a fair number of Netbiter units on cell data. Every once in awhile the Netbiter goes over the allotted cell data plan amount, causing overage charges. In the past couple years, two units have exceeded their monthly amount twice, and one has exceeded their amount once.

The question is - what impacts how much data is used on each of these devices? Does having more alarms use more data? Does leaving the alarms on for longer use more data? Certainly remote firmware upgrades use more data. We are trying to get some “data justification” to our customer.

Thanks!

Hi Nick,

The generally once a Netbiter is setup the devices will fairly consistently use the same amount of data. There were some changes to the backend security over the last year that has cause some increase in data usage but generally only has been an issue for customers with data plans with only a few MB of data.

Live data from a dashboard is one of the main places a user will cause an increase in data. This happens when ever the dashboard views are refreshed.

Log data is a consistent large source of data usage. More short data log uploads will use more data since there is overhead data to upload it into Argos.

There is also data used for the Netbiter to connect to both the tower and then to our servers. We often see an increase in data usage if the Netbiter has a weak signal. This can cause the Netbiter to have to reconnect constantly. It can also cause the Netbiter to resend data increasing the usage on the cellular network.

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Hello,

Our customer is kind of anxious for an answer. Could I get a timeframe that we would have an answer by?

Thanks!

Sorry for the delay I was writing that this morning as you responded.

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@deryck_hms,

No worries, thanks for the great response! Does an increased frequency of alarms, or an increased amount of time that an alarm is high affect data consumption as well?

This is a good questions. When an alarm is triggered the netbiter is sending data to Argos informing it of the alarm. I am not sure if an active alarm keeps sending messages to the servers. I can try looking into it if needed, but I would not expect this to be a significant cause for data usage. If they have a small data plan that gets mostly used up with the netbiter idle the could be a possible reason for overage.

Let me know if you need more details and I can see what i can dig up.