Questions about the new Talk2M Lite
Free gives 3GB per account whereas Lite is 5GB per account? Which means that if I had 6 Flexys, I was able to do 3GB of data transfers to each but now I can only do 5GB of work total between the 6? Is that an accurate assessment?
What is "Concurrent Mobile connections (M2web and Ecatcher mobile)"? Does this mean the number of people that can be connected to Talk2M but not connected to a device on the account? That is, Tom, Sally, Moe, Larry, and Curly are all connected to a Talk2M Free account from their desktop PCs with Tom being connected to the Flexy on the account. If Sally connects to the Flexy, she has to boot Tom off. If Shep tried to log in to Talk2M, he would not be able to since 5 people are logged in already. Is that a correct understanding?
What is the "Service Level Agreement (SLA)"? It gets mentioned, but I can't find any information about it.
This is probably something I need to talk to Sales about, but we have multiple clients which have 1 or more Flexy. We currently setup a Talk2M Free account for every Flexy and only share that account when the customer needs remote access to their SCADA PCs via something like VNC or RDP. How will switching to a Lite or Pro account affect their access? Would I need more than 1 Lite or Pro account? I understand that I can set up groups and pools (and have a new user management nightmare experience!) but even the Pro account only gets 20GB of VPN traffic. Does that mean Customer A gets shafted if Customer B uses a bunch of data??
Any plans for an even cheaper "Xtra Lite" plan that simply charges me for the VPN data I use rather than requiring me to spend time and effort managing users, switching device accounts, monitoring the data usage of multiple customers, etc?
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Hi Tim,
> Free gives 3GB per account whereas Lite is 5GB per account? Which means that if I had 6 Flexys, I was able to do 3GB of data transfers to each but now I can only do 5GB of work total between the 6? Is that an accurate assessment?
That's correct. You may find that Talk2M Pro, with 20 GB of data is a better option for you if you tend to consume a lot of data.
> What is the "Service Level Agreement (SLA)"? It gets mentioned, but I can't find any information about it.
You can find more information in our FAQ:
Talk2m FAQ : About the new Talk2m light plan – HMS Support Portal (hms-networks.com)
Here is a direct link to the SLA info: Talk2m (ewon.biz)
> Does that mean Customer A gets shafted if Customer B uses a bunch of data??
Yes, I guess it does, but a single user shouldn't normally be using that much more data than another. Do you have Free accounts now that are using the entire 3GB/month? I will ask the Talk2M team if they can provide more information about how to deal with this.
> Any plans for an even cheaper "Xtra Lite" plan that simply charges me for the VPN data I use rather than requiring me to spend time and effort managing users, switching device accounts, monitoring the data usage of multiple customers, etc?
At this time, no, but this is something I have heard other customers ask about, so I'll make sure to pass this on.
Honestly, I think you will find that managing users under one account is much easier than having multiple accounts. This is the way the system was designed. It was not designed or intended to be used with a new account for every Ewon.
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Thanks Kyle.
We have ... ~250? ... Flexys out in the field. A 20 GB pool vs the 3GB per device is great if you have one flexy that needs 4 GB of VPN traffic, but its not so great if you have 21 devices that need 1 GB of traffic. I think I've only ever seen us come close to using all 3 GB once when we were updating graphic intensive OIT screens. I'm not sure how much data our customer's who use the Flexy for remote access consume, but I'll have to figure that out.
Looking at the math of a Pro account, it is slightly cheaper to have 2 Pro accounts of 5 concurrent users than a single Pro account that has 10 concurrent users. That might make sense for a company that uses Talk2M internally so that all Acme Inc. users are managed under one account. That's not our use case. Plus, if I add even more remote access customers to that Pro account, I start running into that 20 GB cap issue which makes the prospect of multiple Pro accounts even more financially appealing. So ultimately I'm still faced with an issue of juggling user management across multiple accounts but instead of UserB=>UserBsAccount, it'll be UserG=>Group???Accounts (and if I mess up rights management UserG potentially gets to see UserJ's stuff.)
I realize we are an edge case for how Talk2M is used and our 250 devices are a drop in the bucket compared to the millions deployed, but this move puts us in a very awkward position.
Addendum: Quick question about the user management. I see the Pro account allows 5 concurrent users and its an additional cost for each concurrent user after that. So If I have user's named 1 through 6, that's fine. If 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, all connect at once, that's fine. If 6 connects while 1 through 5 are connected, that's an additional charge. Is there way to prevent 6 from connecting if the others are already connected? What if 1 is connected to multiple devices (one through eCatcher and one through M2Web)? What if 6 comes in early for their shift and connects for only a couple minutes while 5 gets ready to go home for the day?
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Just had a great call with sales and got many questions answered. Looking forward to moving to a Pro account now.
For anyone finding this thread after the fact (I don't want to be DenverCoder9), here are some things to note:
1. Running your own OpenVPN server hosted on Azure will run ~$3000 (I was guesstimating on the size of the VM and I think I planned on 15 concurrent users)
2. Talk2M does not currently have a way to prevent a user from causing you to go over your concurrent user cap, so if you are budgeting for 5 concurrent users and "oversell your seats" (hand out 10 accounts), there is nothing to prevent 6 users from connecting and causing an overage. It doesn't work in our use case, but there is an option to make temporary accounts that are only valid for X number of hours. This would be handy for offering vendor access or something.
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