I work for an insurance company. The company currently pays for lo-jacks for high-end cars, and has often studied the cost of installing some variant of it for the entire fleet.
A GPS car tracker costs a lot less than what you're quoting, when purchased in bulk from China (I don't know about reliability figures though :) ). I think it was in the U$ 15 range for the entire thing. Certainly not the armored thing you're describing, which sounds pretty expensive.
And the cell phone data plan could be negotiated way down (I think your estimate is correct, about U$ 1 or 2 per month). What I pay here as a consumer in Uruguay is less than U$ 5/month for 384 megabytes. Getting a fix is definitely a problem, but you can track it until it gets inside wherever it lost the signal (hopefully it's a warehouse).
That said, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to start putting GPS trackers on pallets :) (I still don't see them being ubiquitous with pets and other higher-value items to track).
If it wasn't feasible for cars (MUCH more expensive than pallets), then I agree with your estimate that it won't happen soon, but it's going to be possible sometime in the near future (and somebody is going to be ready for that, and make a killing).
Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke.
Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to power the thing. The transistors might be getting exponentially cheaper but the batteries aren't. And you need quite a bit of batteries to make this happen.
If you can get a fix to a warehouse you're OK but once the pallets go into an intermodal shipping container and stacked, you're SOL. Shipping container bottoms are made out of wood, not steel so sitting up on a truck they can still get signals. But once they're stacked you're in a world of hurt. Sure the containers might pop back onto the grid once they get unstacked but that might happen once they're out of the country, potentially to countries where you don't have subsidiaries who can go get them back.
So you have two fixed costs: batteries and data/cellular. You have to buy these and you have to pay for them on an ongoing basis. I think what would end up happening is that your battery and data (and plastic recycling and lo-jack refurbishing) costs will end up eating whatever profits you might manage to eke out such that it's not that great of a business to be in.
IMO, one random update per week is good enough to get most of the value from lojacking the things which would drastically lower your power needs. Probably not low enough for parasitic power draw but low enough to spend less than 5$ on the battery.
I'm not around shipping containers day-in and day-out but I don't believe they are. There's SOME metal down there to hold them together but as I understand it they're purposefully not 100% so that if something spills it doesn't pool in the bottom.
A GPS car tracker costs a lot less than what you're quoting, when purchased in bulk from China (I don't know about reliability figures though :) ). I think it was in the U$ 15 range for the entire thing. Certainly not the armored thing you're describing, which sounds pretty expensive.
And the cell phone data plan could be negotiated way down (I think your estimate is correct, about U$ 1 or 2 per month). What I pay here as a consumer in Uruguay is less than U$ 5/month for 384 megabytes. Getting a fix is definitely a problem, but you can track it until it gets inside wherever it lost the signal (hopefully it's a warehouse).
That said, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to start putting GPS trackers on pallets :) (I still don't see them being ubiquitous with pets and other higher-value items to track).
If it wasn't feasible for cars (MUCH more expensive than pallets), then I agree with your estimate that it won't happen soon, but it's going to be possible sometime in the near future (and somebody is going to be ready for that, and make a killing).