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The system runs a about 100kbps down / 30 up when in 1xRTT areas. This jumps to about 600kbps down / 120 up in EVDO. The price for this kind of service from Verizon is only about $30/mo for limited use or $80/mo, flat rate, all you can eat. This opens up a lot of possibilities:
The system's total cost is surprisingly low:
Many of these prices are artificially high as I bought them retail and at single-quantity. Were you making a number of them (for, say, a fleet-tracking application) you could get the price down quite a bit. I'm working on such a solution for my truck-company-owning uncle right now.
Currently I'm working on ways to get into the standard vehicle diagnostics port to give realtime tracking of car data to go with the position data. Other project ideas are things like simple serial-line terminals (or tapping into a consumer car-stereo to use it as a text display) to display things like traffic alerts or instant messages to a driver. Text-to-speech would be handy here as well. One could also use this system as a data backhaul for other existing car electronics projects such as an MP3 player (netradio in motion, anybody?) or live-update to an existing navigation product.
Other upgrades in progress:
I'll set up some forums soon for people who want to replicate and expand on this system. It'd be fun to get a stompbox community together and start getting these things in a bunch of people's cars.
Thanks for reading!