The Proliferation of Satellite IoT — It’s Only Just Beginning
IoT has quickly entered the public lexicon, thanks to the proliferation of “smart” doorbells, fitness sensors, smoke alarms and many other devices that make life easier. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates a potential economic impact of IoT between $4 trillion and $11 trillion a year by 2025, depending on a variety of factors. Satellite IoT is not so well known as it’s small in comparison, but services are well established and also growing with Northern Sky Research predicting satellite IoT to be an $11.6 billion market over the next decade. As enterprise and consumer IoT applications grow in importance in the 15% of the world with cell service, it’s natural that many will want to extend to the rest of the world where connections need to be made from the sky.
Today, Iridium serves more IoT devices around the world than people. IoT has fueled Iridium’s business at a compound annual subscriber growth rate of 25% since 2010. In many ways, Iridium is perfect for IoT – crosslinked satellites in LEO cover every part of the planet and are physically close to customers. While “coverage is king” for IoT, Iridium’s L-band spectrum and orbit also offer advantages. Compared to geostationary orbit, satellites in LEO offer lower latency, can utilize smaller antennas and longer lasting, smaller batteries. This is just physics. In addition, L-band is ideal where IoT data needs to be sent reliably and predictably. Thanks to weather resilience not possible from other frequencies, L-band can receive regulatory approvals for safety of life services – particularly important for High Mobility Personal IoT. Put simply, architecture matters.
Today, Iridium is streamlining the adoption of IoT beyond cellular coverage through a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that simplifies back office programming, and the development of new Iridium Edge end-user devices that integrate GPS, application processors, and solar power. New modems are enabling richer data streams that are ideal for pictures, IP messaging and more complex IoT telematics data.
In the satellite industry overall, there’s a clear trend of three service architectures emerging. These can be broadly categorized as High Mobility Personal IoT; Broadband IoT; and Low Power/High Latency IoT.
High Mobility Personal IoT is the domain of Iridium and we enjoy a strong leadership position delivering high quality, low latency two-way IoT connections. This architecture is designed to send and receive critical information for assets like heavy equipment machines, trucks, ships and aircraft. These can be battery or solar powered and scale from a single device to hundreds of thousands with no geographical limitations. Often, these devices will feature dual-mode cellular/satellite connections, adapting based on the type of coverage available.
The second category, Broadband IoT, features larger, typically fixed position, broadband devices supporting backhaul service for LORA-type IoT networks. While these networks are optimized for IoT services they do come with greater expense per device and will require costs to be amortized across the many needed low-power IoT devices. This is a valuable solution when you have a lot of IoT devices in a specific locality designed for a specific IoT application and will be the likely approach for new constellations like Starlink, OneWeb and Kepler.
The Low Power/High Latency IoT architecture is an emerging satellite segment and dozens of companies are raising funds to launch small satellites that provide this service. While not real-time, they support very low-cost devices that can last for years on a battery charge. A number of low-end applications make sense for this type service, where getting a one-way update once a day or less is all that’s needed. Things like cattle monitoring on ranges spanning thousands of acres or soil sensors for farmers looking to optimize water usage don’t require constant two-way updates, but still offer actionable business information.
The expectations of IoT has expanded dramatically and in many ways mirror those of personal communications. Just like people can’t live without their smartphones today, we’re in the process of expecting everything to be connected everywhere. Vehicles, possessions, business assets and more are being tracked and managed to create better efficiencies. As this expansion takes place, satellite IoT will continue to grow while delivering even smaller, less expensive and more capable devices to the world.
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