Low Data Usage
How Staex MCC minimizes bandwidth consumption for cost-sensitive IoT deployments.
Sources of Excess Data#
VPN solutions consume data in two distinct ways. First, idle auxiliary traffic: keepalive packets, periodic handshakes, and routing updates that flow even when no user data is being transmitted. Second, per-packet overhead: additional bytes added to every packet for routing information, encryption headers, and service metadata.
Optimization Strategies#
MCC reduces idle consumption through differential updates -- only topology changes are propagated, not full routing tables. Public key addressing eliminates DNS lookups, cutting per-packet overhead. Additionally, MCC supports optional traffic compression between nodes (using LZ4), which further reduces the number of bytes transmitted on the wire.
Cost Savings#
For IoT deployments on cellular connectivity with a typical budget of 200 MiB monthly traffic per device, MCC can save up to 1.70 EUR per device per month compared to traditional VPN solutions -- even without enabling compression. The savings are especially pronounced when transmitting numerous small messages, where per-packet overhead dominates the total bandwidth. At fleet scale with thousands of devices, these per-device savings compound into major operational cost reductions.