#cellular

Speccing a Pet Tracker That Doesn't Need a Subscription

“Everyone ships always-on cellular because it's the obvious spec. It's also over-engineered for a pet that's home 95% of the time.”

BLE vs LoRa vs cellular — the connected-product decision matrix

“If your spec says real-time and your power budget says two AA batteries for a year, the spec is wrong.”

Fi ships first units — Atom finally has a non-Mars tracker

“Two weeks on Fi. Battery life: 14 days actual, on a healthy active dog. That's 4-5× what Whistle 3 delivered. The LTE-M bet has paid off.”

The pet-collar power budget — what a multi-week cellular tracker would actually take

“Cellular pet-tracker battery life isn't a marketing number, it's a power-budget engineering problem. The whole game is the modem's average current — and LTE-M's Power Saving Mode is the first thing I've seen that could move it by 10×.”

Six months on the Whistle GPS Pet Tracker — the cellular realities

“Claimed 7-day battery. Real 3-4 days the moment GPS is doing the job you bought it for. The 'when it matters' number — dog out, located every few minutes — is closer to a single day. Divide the box claim by two for steady state, by seven for the emergency.”

Whistle's GPS Pet Tracker ships with cellular — and Mars Petcare buys Whistle the same month

“A pet-food company now owns the collar that tells me whether my dog is active enough. That isn't a theoretical conflict — it's the same firm saying 'feed more' and selling the food.”

Tagg vs Whistle — cellular vs BLE pet-tracker philosophies

“Cellular tracker, $7.95 a month. BLE tracker, nothing a month. But the subscription isn't the real difference — the radio is. One keeps a cellular modem half-awake and dies in three days; the other sleeps until your dog walks past the house and lasts a week.”