Vending & Unattended Retail SIM Cards
Multi-network data SIMs for cashless readers, machine telemetry and route planning — on machines nobody visits until something has already gone wrong.
Machines live in the worst places for signal
Corridors, basements, station concourses, factory floors, leisure centres. A vending machine is sited where the footfall is and plugged into whatever socket is nearest — usually surrounded by steel, concrete and other machines.
Up to four networks, one SIM
In the UK, France and Spain a Wave SIM reaches four operators. In Germany, Italy and Ireland, three. Deep indoor coverage varies hugely between them, which is exactly the difference between a machine that reports and one that does not.
Profile changes without a site visit
On hardware that supports remote provisioning we load or switch the network profile for you from our side — no van, no unlocking a machine on someone else's premises. It depends on the device, so ask us whether yours qualifies.
Buy the data, not a contract
30-day and 12-month plans are bought outright, with no monthly tie and no minimum fleet size. Pooled data across a machine estate is priced separately — tell us the count and we'll quote it.
What an offline machine costs you
Unattended retail has no one standing there to notice. Every failure is silent until it reaches a report.
A dead reader takes nothing
Cashless is now most of the take on a modern machine. A reader that cannot authorise does not fall back to coins people no longer carry — it simply stops selling, quietly, for as long as it takes someone to walk past and try.
The van goes out wrong
Stale stock data means the wrong load, a wasted drop or a machine left empty for another week. Route planning is only as good as the last telemetry that got through.
You hear it from the customer
On someone else's premises, a machine that has been down for a fortnight is not your discovery — it is a phone call from the site manager, and sometimes the end of the placement.
What you'll be connecting
Tiny payloads on a relentless schedule, and one or two things with a screen that change the sums.
What a machine actually uses
Vending is among the cheapest things on earth to connect. The sums only change when a screen is involved.
A cashless reader
Roughly 10–30 MB a month at a few dozen transactions a day. The authorisation is kilobytes; the rest is heartbeat and settlement.
Reader plus full telemetry
Roughly 50–150 MB a month once DEX polls, stock levels, temperature logs and fault codes are added.
A micro-market kiosk
The outlier: 0.3–1 GB a month with product images, promotions and a touchscreen to keep current. Size these separately from the machines.
A machine on a 1 GB / 1 month plan is usually over-provisioned, and a 6 GB / 12 month plan covers a year with room for a busy site. On an estate of any size the real question is pooling rather than plan size — one pool across two hundred machines is far less to administer than two hundred renewals.
These are indicative figures, not measurements of your estate. Send us a month of traffic from one live machine and we will size the rest against it before you buy anything.
Plans for machines and estates
Prices shown in your own currency. Most telemetry boards and readers take a standard SIM, so check the slot before choosing the eSIM — though the eSIM saves opening a machine on a customer's premises later.
Europe 6 GB / 12 Months
Most boughtStandard SIM
Europe 12 GB / 12 Months
Standard SIM
Running an estate rather than a handful, or want one pool across the whole route? Talk to us about volume pricing.
Common questions
Will our older 2G or 3G telemetry boards still work?
No, and this is the thing to check before anything else. 2G and 3G have been switched off across much of Europe and the rest is going. If a machine still has a 2G-only modem, no SIM will bring it back — the board needs replacing with a 4G one. Worth auditing your estate for this independently of who supplies the data.
The machine is in a basement with no signal. What then?
Reaching four operators instead of one often turns an unusable spot into a usable one, because deep indoor coverage is where networks differ most. Where nothing penetrates at all, an external antenna on a short run to a stairwell or window does more than any tariff. That is a siting fix, and cheaper to do at install than on a callout.
Can one plan cover a route across several countries?
Within the region you buy, yes — an operator with machines in France, Spain and Germany can run one plan type across all three rather than sourcing locally in each. The exact country list is on each plan's product page, so check it against your route before ordering.
Does the APN change when the SIM switches network?
No. The APN is set once on the board and stays put through reselection, so one configuration works across every machine you fit, whichever operator a given site attaches to.
What if a machine uses more than its plan?
Nothing auto-bills at a surprise rate. Refills on a prepaid plan go up to 100 GB, so a busy site is a top-up rather than a migration, and the portal can notify you before a plan runs out rather than after. Across an estate, pooled data has no cap and is quoted — usually far simpler than a plan per machine.
Tell us about your estate
How many machines, what telemetry they run and where the route goes. We'll size it and send a quote, usually the same day.