Hologram - a developer friendly international SIM

Hologram is a US company that offers both a hardware cellular device called a Dash, back-end cloud services and international SIMs that can be used globally.

The Dash is programmable through the Arduino IDE (and is supported out the box in recent versions) and the Dash firmware directly supports Holograms cloud services.

The cloud services know about Dash devices and then various routes can be set, which allow things to be sent to the Dash or from the Dash to another service (like IFTTT, Slack, etc).

The SIM is a standard 2G/3G SIM that can be fitted in a Dash and then be used on any supported mobile network. There are various pricing models with paid plans starting at $0.40 per month with data costing $0.60 / MB (billed by KB) in a pay-as-you-go service or pre-pay: -

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Data	Zone 1	Zone 2
500KB	$0.59	------
1MB	$0.99	$1.29
2MB	$1.49	$1.99
3MB	$1.49	$2.99
5MB	$2.99	$3.99
10MB	$3.99	$6.99
20MB	$5.99	$12.99
30MB	$6.99	$16.99
50MB	$7.99	$28.99
100MB	$14.99	$47.99
125MB	$18.99	$59.99
250MB	$32.99	------
500MB	$55.99	------

There are also US only plans: -

$8.00	250MB
$12.00	500MB
$20.00	1GB
$36.00	2GB
$70.00	5GB

SMS	Zone 1	Zone 2
INBOUND (to device)	FREE	FREE
OUTBOUND (from device)	$0.19 / Message	$0.30 / Message

Zone 1 is EU, US etc and Zone 2 Canada, bits of Africa/South America and other odd countries.

Hologram have just announced a Developer plan (1 SIM ONLY), which gives 1MB per month absolutely free (and then $0.60 per MB billed by KB) and they'll even ship it for free using code "DEVPLANBLASTOFF" (no quotes).

That's pretty useful so testing the service is easy, without spending a lot of data charges.

The Dash has some pretty nice features too, such as being able to sent program and even firmware updates OTA (though that's going to quickly eat data, especially for firmware updates).

O2 upgrades HLR

O2 is spending £10m revamping it's mobile registration database system (know as an HLR or Home Location Register) as it has suffered 2 major outages in as many months. The HLR stores the customer IMSI (SIM number) and their real telephone number as well as location and other information. When a call comes in, the HLR is queried to find out how do deliver the call the mobile. If the HLR fails, then mobile calls will not work (as mobiles cant register on to the network) and calls to mobiles will fail too. The current HLR (or cluster of HLRs) are made by Ericsson and O2 is buying new systems.

Chop a SIM and fit in an iPad

The new iPad2 (or any old iPad or iPhone) requires what's known as a micro SIM or uSIM. These have the same electrical connections as a normal SIM but are slightly smaller.

There's a problem in ordering uSIMs as the mobile network operators (MNOs) know that it's going to be stuck into an Apple device and therefore they'll want to stick you on a nice long (and expensive) iPhone or iPad contract. It is possible to get a normal SIM on a much more suitable (i.e. cheaper) contract, but the SIM wont fit in the iPad.

When the uSIM first appeared there were lots of "hacks" around which showed how to get a knife and physically cut the SIM into uSIM form (including the now famous John Benson "Meat cleaver" blog) and then a plethora of cutting devices appeared which allows a SIM to be inserted, pressure applied and out pops a uSIM.

This seemed a bit drastic, but there's several companies who offer free SIMs and once snuggly inserted in the SIM cutter, chop and a uSIM pops out. When placed in the iPad it nicely seemed to work too.