Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449.<p>USD $5/MO PER DEVICE<p>Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet), including up to 60 downlink (2-way) data packets
I love how they define "activation date" for the data plan!<p>> 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 have one of their dev kits (the neat one with a built in solar panel and Wi-Fi connection) - sadly I was unable to get it to send/receive more than 1 message in San Francisco over a 3 month period.<p>(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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Huh, for some reason, I thought that the FCC would fine and regulate this company into oblivion after their unauthorized launch stunt. Looks like that didn't quite happen the way I expected.<p><a href="https://spacenews.com/swarm-ceo-talks-past-mistakes-future-goals/" rel="nofollow">https://spacenews.com/swarm-ceo-talks-past-mistakes-future-g...</a>
I see some possible problems:<p>- IMHO, price could be prohibitive for many use cases (e.g. water meters)<p>- Signal strength could be an issue for urban environments (e.g. inside buildings)<p>- 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).
This reminds me of Hiber[1]. Hiber launched in 2016 with the mission of connecting the 90% of the world that didn’t have access to connectivity. They were working on HiberBand, a protocol to communicate ultra-low power for remote IoT solutions. It sounded very promising and futuristic, a bit like a mix between Starlink and Swarm of today.
At some point Hiber pivoted away from a connectivity-only business model. You could no longer use them for general purpose IoT connectivity, instead they focused on building end-to-end solutions. Hiber today markets itself as an "off-grid asset monitoring" solution focusing heavily on the oil industry.<p>I suspect there is some underlying issue with these high-latency / low-bandwidth solutions that just makes them impractical in real life.<p>[1]: <a href="https://hiber.global/hiberhilo/" rel="nofollow">https://hiber.global/hiberhilo/</a>
Ultimately what this means is that data transfer speeds will be faster, yes? (That's a question.) If most internet usage is direct to satellite and then satellite to endpoint this would mean that tier one hub networks would no longer be used. So laser replaces fiber for most of the distance, with a peer to peer satellite network that would make outages less common. Which would be both faster and more reliable. The only issue I see is for there to be an intentional or unintentional satellite debris event that would be self propagating, but that issue has been around for a while anyway.
What exactly is the plan here for when a satellite is obsolete or dies?
Currently we either have the satellite re-enter earths atmosphere or we use the last bit of fuel to send them even fruther away. But these seems very static<p>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.<p>Can we please consider the amount of trash we send out in space before it is too late?
I can't get to their documentation but it looks like it's using LoRa for the RF.<p><a href="https://blog.semtech.com/satellite-iot-qa-with-swarm" rel="nofollow">https://blog.semtech.com/satellite-iot-qa-with-swarm</a><p>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.
What does the data collection end of this look like? In a home IOT setup, for example, you'd typically have a single machine (Border Router in a Thread setup) collecting all the data from each node.<p>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.
> Swarm uses a narrow band carrier (about 40 kHz wide), and a chirped spread spectrum approach<p>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.
Unrelated to Bruce Sterling's Space Swarm <a href="https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Swarm.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Swarm.pdf</a>
You can purchase a single breakout board from Sparkfun: <a href="https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19236" rel="nofollow">https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19236</a>
Well this is terrifying. Pretty soon you'll have to crack open your appliances to snip the antennas to prevent them from calling home, rather than just not giving them the wifi password...!
Surprised dedicated ultra low bandwidth satellites are the way to go when developing a service like this versus piggybacking on something like StarLink.
Under 150KB per month, $5.<p>Under 300KB per month, $10.<p>Under 450KB per month, $15.<p>Up to 600KB per month, $20.<p>Note, that's total number of bytes, not bytes per second.
Why isn’t this mandatory on ALL planes? A simple device like this (or similar ones) would make real-time tracking of all flights a reality.<p>We’ll see many new things and interesting technologies in the coming years, like this one and also the one in iPhones.