A vehicle running Pysae needs a data connection to report its position in real time and receive its transport plan. This article gives an order of magnitude for that usage and the data plan to budget for each SIM card.

Almost all data usage comes from the Pysae Driver app: reporting the vehicle position throughout the service and displaying the map. The transport plan, downloaded at each publication, and the messages exchanged with the control room account for a very small share.

For a vehicle running around ten hours a day, 22 days a month, expect between 350 and 800 MB per month. The range depends mainly on the length of service: a vehicle running all day uses several times more than one operating only at school peak hours.

Equipment interfaced with Pysae, whether ticketing, destination sign or passenger counting, communicates with the tablet over the vehicle local network, through the onboard router. These exchanges do not go through the Internet and therefore have no significant impact on your data plan.

However, if this equipment is itself connected to the router to communicate with its own back office, that traffic goes through your SIM card and adds to Pysae usage.

The SIM card is not used by Pysae alone. The Android system, the app store and software updates also consume data, especially in the month a new version is rolled out. If you use a mobile device management solution, its exchanges add up as well.

A 1 GB monthly plan per vehicle is not enough as soon as the vehicle runs regularly. We recommend at least 2 GB per SIM card, and 3 GB for a comfortable margin.

If your carrier offers a shared data pool across all your cards, that is the best fit for a fleet: vehicles that run little offset those that run a lot, which avoids running out mid-month.

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