They generously offer you a free SIM card when going through passport control in Dubai. I can’t think of any other reason to do that, besides pure benevolence.
I read an article a few years ago about someone using a SIM card embedded in a product like this for free internet. The connection was severely limited though.
There already are on Sony TVs. My roommate is always connecting it when I’m away and I have to factory reset it and go through the dark pattern to use it without WiFi.
Prompt for a login or to check for updates on every start or once a week. It wouldn’t be difficult to get the numbers up for the number of online devices.
What would be the monthly cost per unit to LG for servicing those cell modems? Data-only, and I presume they could get some kind of bulk discount as a big manufacturer.
the alternative is they'll develop some common mesh local network that'll grab data through any gateway. Imagine your tv connecting to some wireless headphones which have multipoint feature enabled and connected to a smartphone which has wifi, tv sends encrypted data to buds, buds to phone and phone to some external source. Ofc it can be more sophisticated but totally doable and plausible.
Or imagine some localized automesh based on zigbee/matter-> you have a philips hue lamp connected to wifi, tv connects to it and it forwards data... I totally believe this will be the next development of ad networks and sold as 'better smart home devices'. And it'll not require any LTE. Or it can have LTE only on some subset of devices while others will use that as gateway.
probably a couple of dollars a month, which would be very tough to actually make work. Even facebook only makes a few hundred dollars a year per person in the US.
Amazon had a data deal for Kindles for a long time. If we're assuming nefariousness, the embedded SIM would only be used for analytics/telemetry not for content, so it shouldn't be too much data.
If Neilsen will give me $1 to have a journal of what I watch, they might give Samsung something to have actual logs.
