Why is that? Kilowatt hours is how electrical energy use is billed (at least in Australia) and I just pulled out my last bill and can see I used around 2200 kWh for last quarter, so around 24 kWh per day so it's a convenient unit for comparison. Unless you're thinking of seeing batteries quotes in Ah which doesn't mean much without knowing the nominal voltage.

I hadn't heard of them before but the only 3G + GPS solutions using Python I've heard of are Telit modules, doing a search for Telit products it's probably something like the following:

HE910 Mini PCIe - 3G

I did some work on a legacy embedded system using a 2400bps modem about 5 years back and it still worked fine over a modern phone system when the receiving end was VoIP with an analog modem attached. It was part of a gas meter reading systems where it piggy-backed on a POTS line and reported usage once a day, the tiny amount of data being transmitted only needed about a 30 second connection so a few hundred reporting back to a single line overnight with staggered connections and retries was practical. Some vending machines used to do the same until relatively recently but much rarer now that a GSM subscription can be had for $50 per annum in volume so trying to make use of an existing land-line would have a long payback time given the extra installation costs.

I've read a few of these stories lately and while personally I run a Mikrotik router with a separate access point I thought the vast majority of shitty consumer routers still had a basic firewall that blocked all incoming connections by default? Plus for those that don't presumably all these IoT device would need NAT on your typical home network to be accessible externally so does anyone know if UPnP is required for these exploits to work? I realize this only applies to external port scans but I'd assume that's how most botnets find target devices rather than because of outgoing connections to the vendor's server that may be compromised.

I'm not so sure with mobile devices that's as easy as it sounds. I'm not aware of the situation in other countries but in Australia you normally sit behind NAT and don't get a publicly routable IP address. I once inquired with with a carrier if it was possible to get one so I could VNC into an embedded system using a dynamic DNS arrangement and the answer was it was only available as an add-on option for corporate accounts, and that meant having a minimum of 500 phone services.