The cost of something you are looking to use for long term can be split in couple of categories, cost of purchase and cost of ownership. Where cost of purchase is the immediate cost occurring when you acquire something and cost of ownership is the long term cost over the lifetime of the product.

The asset trackers are great example of this split cost where you can see it as something that a) might outlive your asset and you move it to the next one without requiring to splash out the cost of new tracker for your new machine or trailer or b) does your asset outlive your tracker and you need to purchase multiple trackers through it’s lifetime.

When we are looking the market we see still surprisingly many vendors pushing 2G tracking devices to their customers. The only reason for that is greed. The 4G devices are normally at least 15-20% more expensive and those vendors can either just add that as a profit or compete on the market with cheaper offerings.

For uneducated customer it looks like a great deal, they get cheaper cost of purchase without realizing that the cost of ownership will hit them much sooner than they thought.

Unfortunately this is common practice across many industries today. The phenomena is called “Planned obsolescence” where the vendor sells customer either low quality or soon to be obsolete product in hopes to encourage sales of new products and upgrades to the same customer in the short to mid-term.

Any excuse like “But we don’t have that great 4G coverage in all areas yet” is also mute as all the quality 4G devices can fall back to 2G networks in case they don’t have coverage.