The Question Nobody Answers Straight
Ask a carrier how much data your IoT devices need and you will usually get a plan recommendation rather than an answer. That is backwards. The right plan falls out of the usage, not the other way round, and getting the order wrong is what leaves a fleet either overspending every month or dropping reports in the field.
The good news is that most IoT devices use far less data than people assume. The bad news is that "far less" spans two orders of magnitude depending on what the device does.
This guide walks through how to size a data-only plan properly. It is written from what we see across Nexitel IoT deployments, where the same two mistakes account for most of the wasted spend.
What Actually Consumes the Data
Three things determine a connected device's monthly usage, and only one of them is obvious.
Reporting interval
How often the device phones home. A tracker reporting once a minute uses roughly sixty times the data of one reporting hourly. This is the single biggest lever you control, and it is usually set once at deployment and never revisited.
Payload size
What it sends each time. A GPS position fix is tiny — coordinates, a timestamp, a battery level, typically well under a kilobyte. An image or a video clip is thousands of times larger. Devices that send media belong in a completely different planning bracket from devices that send readings.
Protocol overhead
The part people forget. Every transmission carries connection setup, headers, and acknowledgements on top of the payload itself. On very small, very frequent messages the overhead can exceed the data you actually care about. Devices using lightweight protocols like MQTT fare considerably better here than ones making a full HTTPS request per reading.
Rough Monthly Ranges by Device Type
Treat these as planning starting points, not guarantees — your firmware and reporting interval will move them substantially.
Asset and container trackers reporting a few times a day typically land in the single-digit megabytes per month. These are the cheapest devices to connect and the ones most often over-provisioned.
GPS and fleet vehicle trackers reporting every one to five minutes during working hours usually run somewhere in the tens of megabytes per month. Add driver behaviour telemetry or engine diagnostics and that climbs.
Environmental and industrial sensors sending periodic readings are usually low single-digit megabytes, unless they are configured for high-frequency sampling.
Smart meters and utility endpoints are typically very light, often under a megabyte, because they batch readings and report infrequently.
Connected cameras and dashcams are the outlier. Any device uploading footage should be planned in gigabytes, not megabytes, and the real number depends entirely on resolution, clip length, and how much is uploaded versus stored locally.
Digital signage and kiosks vary with content refresh. Text and static images are light; video content is not.
The practical takeaway: if your deployment is trackers and sensors, you are almost certainly looking at a small data allowance per line. If it involves cameras, everything changes.
The Mistake That Costs Most
Over-provisioning is the expensive error, and it is the common one. Buying a multi-gigabyte plan for a tracker that uses eight megabytes a month feels safe, and across five hundred devices it is simply money leaving the business every month for capacity nobody uses.
Under-provisioning has the opposite failure mode: it does not show up on an invoice, it shows up as gaps in your data, and by the time anyone notices, the reports are already missing.
Both are avoidable with the same step.
Measure Before You Scale
Deploy a small pilot — five or ten devices is enough — in the same configuration and the same conditions as the real rollout. Run it for a full billing cycle, including whatever your busiest week looks like, and read the actual per-device usage.
That number, plus headroom for firmware updates and seasonal peaks, is your plan size. It beats every estimate in this article, including the ranges above, because it reflects your firmware, your reporting interval, and your environment.
Two things to watch during the pilot: firmware and OS updates can dwarf a month of ordinary telemetry in a single download, and devices in poor coverage often use more data than expected because failed transmissions get retried.
Choosing the Plan
Once you know the number, the decision is straightforward. Data-only prepaid plans avoid paying for talk and text your devices will never use, and no long-term contract means you can resize as the deployment changes rather than being locked to a guess you made before launch.
Where Nexitel fits
Nexitel supplies prepaid data-only SIM and eSIM for IoT and M2M devices on two US networks, which is the part that matters most once you have your number.
Nexitel Blue runs on the AT&T network. Nexitel Purple runs on the T-Mobile network. Both carry nationwide 5G. For anything that moves, coverage matters more than the data allowance — a tracker on the wrong network in a rural corridor will retry, burn data, and still miss reports — so the practical question is which of the two covers the routes and sites your devices actually operate in. Nexitel is one of the few places you can pick either without changing supplier.
Every Nexitel plan is prepaid with no long-term contract, so a deployment can be resized as it grows rather than locked to a pre-launch estimate. Both physical SIM and eSIM are available, and Nexitel ships physical SIMs internationally from the United States for deployments assembled outside the US.
You can see the current data-only options on the Nexitel IoT plans page, and the full plan catalog if you want the pricing side by side.
Deploying at Volume
For anything beyond a handful of devices, provisioning one SIM at a time stops being practical quickly. A Nexitel dealer account puts ordering and activation for the whole deployment in one place, and eSIM removes shipping from the equation for hardware that supports it — useful when devices are assembled or installed somewhere other than your depot.
If you are rolling out a fleet, the bulk activation process covers ordering and provisioning at that scale, and fleet tracking connectivity goes deeper on vehicle and telematics deployments specifically.
The Short Version
Most IoT devices need far less data than the plans sold to them. Trackers and sensors are usually megabytes a month; cameras are gigabytes. Pilot ten devices for one billing cycle, read the real number, add headroom, and buy that. It is a week of patience that pays back every month the deployment runs.
If you want a second opinion on the sizing, or you are planning a rollout large enough that getting it wrong is expensive, the Nexitel team will talk it through with you before you order — get in touch.
AT&T and T-Mobile are trademarks of their respective owners. Nexitel is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.