awk2861@gmail.com wrote in news:876a8f80-7f9e-477e-9a62-7824c037f828
@e39g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

Nope.  Those in power will do everything they can do to keep such a system
off the air.....to protect their revenue pot.

It's hard to make a recommendation without knowing the amount and type of
data you're transmitting.

All of the "long range radio modems" I've seen can handle 20 miles or so,
but that's line of sight- no way that's going to work in a city environment,
which probably leaves cellular as your only reasonable option.

Unlimited cellular data plans are certainly expensive, but that means you
need to take a hard look at the amount of and type of data you want to send-
is this "simple" data (i.e. lat/long location and maybe a few bytes of
vehicle status?) is this data that REALLY needs to be sent "every 5 minutes"
rather than just logged and read when the vehicles come "home" at the end of
each day?

AT&T offers prepaid data on their "GoPhone" prepaid plans- it's expensive
($0.01/kb, IIRC) but if you're sending just a few bytes a session, a $30-70
"unlimited" plan might be overkill.  Alternatively, can this data be
packaged and sent as e-mail or an SMS message?  Unlimited SMS bundles are
available for less than data plans.  If the drivers are carrying phones
anyway, perhaps the vehicle equipment can be connected to the drivers'
phones via bluetooth or a cradle, and send e-mail or SMS with the pertinant
data through the existing phone.

Just because something is technically possible doesn't make it feasible.  A
friend of mine was doing a cost analysis for his company where they wanted
to give all of their drivers nifty little WinCE-based PDAs to barcode scan
shipments and deliveries and upload the data to the main office, to save on
data entry personnel.  Between the wireless units and cell data service,
they esimated the rollout would cost over a million dollars in the first
year, and would only eliminate two or three sub-$40,000 data-entry jobs.