Should we be thinking about a Satellite Internet of Things? The emerging battle between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for low-earth-orbit satellite broadband raises the question, not because satellite broadband is a universal option, but because it’s an option where other options don’t exist, and likely won’t for decades. That could be a killer IoT opportunity.
Satellite broadband isn’t the Holy Grail of broadband in general. In nearly every case where terrestrial options are available to consumers, they’d be better off taking them. Furthermore, my model says that 5G/FTTN millimeter-wave and even 5G mobile technology offer a better general solution to consumer broadband problems caused by low demand density. But IoT is different, or at least the “real” new-connection IoT opportunity is.
Where IoT is within a facility, it will almost always be cheaper to use traditional short-range wireless technology, or even sensor wiring, to connect it. Where the IoT elements are widely spaced and, in particular, when they’re actually mobile, you need some form of wide-area solution. The operators’ hopes for massive 5G revenue were (and in some cases, still are) based on the vain hope that companies will pay monthly 5G bills to connect what WiFi could connect already. The real question is those things that WiFi can’t connect.
5G faces a problem that goes back as far as (gasp!) ISDN. CIMI Corporation signed the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and so I had an opportunity to play in the early justification for ISDN. I remember well one particular occasion when a technical representative from a big vendor came in and said, with breathless excitement, “We’ve discovered a new application for ISDN! We call it ‘File Transfer’!” Well, gosh, we were already doing that. The point is that there’s always been a tendency to justify a new technology by showing what it can do, rather than what it can do better.
We can do any sort of IoT connectivity with 5G, and nobody questions that. However, we already have IoT in millions of residential applications, applications which demand a very cost-effective and simple-to-deploy solution, and none of it uses 5G. Rather than looking at how 5G could help where no help is needed, why not look at what current technology doesn’t do well?
The most demanding of all IoT applications involve sensors and controllers that are mobile. 5G is a mobile technology, so why wouldn’t we see it as a possible fit? I had an opportunity to engage a big Tier One about their 5G developer program, and I mentioned this issue to one of the program heads. The response was “Yes, that’s a great application, but there aren’t enough of those mobile sensors to create a really good market for us.” In other words, start with the number you want and then make up stories that appear to get you there.
The problem with 5G sensors is that if they consume mobile service, they require a monthly cost. A small percentage of home security systems have mobile-radio connectivity to the alarm center, and these will add around two hundred dollars per year (or more) to the cost of monitoring, plus the cost of the system itself. Imagine a vast sensor network, with each sensor racking up a nice fat cellular service bill, and you see why my Tier One program head thought it would be exciting. It would, for those getting the money. For those spending it, not so much.
The interesting thing was that the day after I had this conversation with the operator, I was watching one of my wildlife shows, and it was about elephant tracking. They had a satellite GPS system attached to an elephant, and it provided a means of getting regular position updates on the animal. No 5G (or even 4G) infrastructure needed. Why not have satellite IoT? I’m not suggesting that the exact same technology be used, but that satellite Internet could in fact support most of the remote-site and mobile IoT applications that have been proposed for 5G.
The nice thing about satellite is that almost all the cost is in getting the bird into orbit. Once you’ve done that, you can support users up to the design capacity at no incremental service cost. No matter where the sensors are installed, no matter how they might roam about, you can keep in touch with them. Since sensor telemetry is low-bandwidth, you could support a heck of a lot of sensors with one of those satellite systems.
Satellite-based IoT would be a great solution for the transportation industry. Put a “goods collar” on a shipment, on every vehicle that carries goods, and on every facility that handles and cross-loads the goods, and you could track something everywhere it goes in near real time. Wonder if your freezer car is malfunctioning and letting all your expensive lobster or tuna spoil? You can know about the first sign of a problem and get something out to intercept and fix or replace the broken vehicle. Vandalism? Covered. Satellite applications of IoT for transportation, or for anything that’s mobile, could be killer apps for those competing satellite networks.
So, probably, could many fixed-installation applications that people are also claiming as 5G opportunities. Sensors and controllers in an in-building IoT system can be connected through local wiring or a half-dozen different industrial control RF protocols, including WiFi and WiFi 6. Stuff that’s somewhere out there in the wild aren’t so easily connected, but they’d be child’s play for satellite IoT. Even power could be less an issue. Elephants are big, but they can’t carry a substation on their collar, so you can make these satellite systems’ power requirements modest enough to be supported for a long period on a battery.
Battery? Who knows batteries better than Musk? Amazon already builds IoT sensor/controller devices in the Ring line. It seems to me like these guys are missing an opportunity by not pushing IoT applications for their dueling satellite data networks.
Or are they? I hear some whispers that there are in fact a number of initiatives either being quietly supported by one of the contenders for satellite-data supremacy, or are being watched closely by one. Some are attracting the attention of both. We may see some action in this space quickly, and if it does, not only will it be a powerful validation of satellite broadband, it could force some realism into claims of 5G applications. After all, we’ve done a heck of a lot of file transfer, and it didn’t help ISDN.