USD $5/MO PER DEVICE
Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet), including up to 60 downlink (2-way) data packets
144,000 bytes. Almost the capacity as a Commodore 1541 disk drive.
40 years ago it would have been unfathomable that a regular schmoe could transmit a floppy disk via satellite for just $5.
Also, not sure where to find a decent Commodore system these days to utilize this plan :)
A quick example, you have a sensor that sends a single metric every minute. Suppose that you can pack that info (sensor id, metric type and data) in 32 bytes. You're looking at about 1.2MB/month of data (8 times your 144K), which will come to about $40/month.
Quite expensive for a single data point, but I can imagine several use cases where that cost can be easily justified.
192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
Sensors along a pipeline etc to monitor remote infrastructure.
Texting in remote areas for logging, cattle, forestry services, etc.
Redundancy for boats, emergency services etc that may have primary and secondary communication channels, but still greatly benefit from the capacity for redundant txt messages.
2 way communications aren't much more demanding because most of what you need can be done with lookup tables, and there aren't that many different commands you would need to send to an asset tag for local scanning. If you want to do person-to-person, 2 bytes per word is sufficient for a fairly large vocabulary (especially a tightly specified one like military brevity codes) - not exactly chatty but sufficient for many operational/emergency purposes.
I bet the military/intelligence community has all sorts of ideas!
Their suggested architecture was basically to use this for notifications for very remote sensors: "battery below 20%. Come help" etc
The other way is for things like Garmin InReach: "Send message 1" (which is "I'm ok and don't need help") etc.
In the normal case, you send a heartbeat once per (interval calibrated to threat model). Should be plenty of packets left to encode "send lawyers, guns and money" when necessary.
Hopefully some resellers pop up that let you buy them onesie-twosie to tinker with.
I wonder how much total bandwidth each of these satellites can push per month. Anyone know the backend aggregate sustained data rate per sat?
They were anticipating some legislation that would require full auditability of supply chain.
Could always do a groupgets anyway.
Some people even connect their watches, which monitor (or will soon monitor) everything from their heart rate, sleep schedule, oxygen levels, BMI, etc.
I frankly don't think it can get much more intrusive.
If someone could get their hands on my data, it'd be a bunch of extra work to determine who it's coming from.
>>Some people even connect their watches, which monitor (or will soon monitor) everything from their heart rate, sleep schedule, oxygen levels, BMI, etc.
You can easily have a watch that does all these things but doesn't share any data, and you can be sure of that based on more than just promises. Open hardware, open software, local data storage and zero-knowledge for anything touching the internet. It's well within our grasp technically, we the people just need to demand it.
I literally watched a large excavator from a dealer break sanctions and show up digging in Iran.
Under 300KB per month, $10.
Under 450KB per month, $15.
Up to 600KB per month, $20.
Note, that's total number of bytes, not bytes per second.
I understand the "field device" -> "satellite" uplink step. But, what's the next step? Another device just for downlink data would eat through the data cap in no time.
Eg GET api.swarm.space/devices/$id/recent
Super-interesting though.
Edit: Wrong, see below
https://www.space.com/spacex-to-acquire-swarm-technologies-s...
We’ll see many new things and interesting technologies in the coming years, like this one and also the one in iPhones.
And engine makers and airframe makers already do it, much like heavy equipment makers already do it. https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_...
https://spacenews.com/swarm-ceo-talks-past-mistakes-future-g...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-satellite-fine/fcc-fi...
- IMHO, price could be prohibitive for many use cases (e.g. water meters)
- Signal strength could be an issue for urban environments (e.g. inside buildings)
- There aren't many small business use cases for IoT connectivity that does beyond WiFi (both wrt range and power budget). What I have seen is that there are usually several big players (e.g. utilities, municipality, factories) that at some point deploy LoRa based or similar connectivity. LoRa can actually cover a huge area with just a handful of self operated gateways (similar to Helium in this respect).
- Wave paths are more complex (buildings, multi path propagation etc). Hence base stations need to be positioned more densely.
- Finding optimal locations for base stations and contracting the building/land owners is not straightforward.
- Using the less congested, licensed spectrum instead of the crowded ISM bands may be preferable in the city.
https://blog.semtech.com/satellite-iot-qa-with-swarm
Pretty cool. Just checked coverage over my house using their pass checker and it's already ~50% coverage through the course of the day. No good for realtime alerting but good enough for daily reporting.
Ducks
…like people’s cars.
Not that I think the sky is falling and this is the end of privacy or anything.
> The hardware will be charged upfront but the subscription data plan will not be charged until the device is activated. The activation date (and $60/yr billing date) for a device is the first of the following month once ≥50 messages are sent. For example, if your device sends its ≥50th message on April 8th, your device would be charged on May 1st. And would renew annually on May 1st until you opt-out.
(I live on a side of a hill and had the entire dev kit standing on my roof that was tall enough to have a view over a large part of the city and out into the bay)
At the time, I heard from support that they were launching new satellites that would improve the connectivity in built up locations (such as a city) but I eventually gave up.
At the time, there were 2 satellites a day that were prospects to connect to based on my location, but we met an invisible issue that couldn't be debugged. Potentially it was a satellite visibility issue but could have also been that the available satellite connection was backlogged with other devices / the satellite didn't have a large enough window of connectivity to perform the upload / there was noise interfering with the connection / other mysterious reason that would need expensive test equipment to root cause.
I took it with me into the plains one day (Livermore) and it connected once in the 8.5 hours I was there so it was functional and the RF signal strength was good for the received packet.
My takeaway was that the tech is well suited for rural areas all over the globe where there is no other connectivity options and there exists applications that can work well with the high latency / low bandwidth payloads. Well monitoring jumps to mind as does CO2 gas monitoring in mines - slow moving signals, rural locations, expensive to send a truck to go and monitor.
1. Long distance communication require HF frequencies which requires very large antennas.
2. If you’re talking specifically about the HF amateur radio bands, you may not use those for commercial purposes.
Ignored completely. Musk was cool until he opened his mouth all the way.
I suspect there is some underlying issue with these high-latency / low-bandwidth solutions that just makes them impractical in real life.
If these truly are just 11x11x2.8cm - then in a few years we will have bunch of super fast and very destructive mini bullets orbiting earth and destroying very expensive space equipment.
Can we please consider the amount of trash we send out in space before it is too late?
Is this LoRa? I guess if it was they wouldn't need their own modems. There have been some hobbyist attempts to put LoRa gateways on satellites and from what I remember it worked reasonably well.
