Steve Rogerson speaks with Laurent Vieira de Mello from Astrocast about the future of satellite IoT.

There is a problem when it comes to tracking and monitoring stuff using IoT technology and that is there has to be a network in place. Now, if we are talking about a smart-city application, that should not be a problem. Cities have cellular coverage, many have wifi, and these days lots have the likes of LoRa or Sigfox to connect all their smart meters and clever traffic lights.

This is not so in some rural areas and certainly not the case for tracking goods on a ship across the oceans. Here, satellites come into their own. However, the satellite networks for the most part were not designed for IoT use cases, but rather high data applications; something I appreciate when I watch live football on Sky rather than the latency and pauses that happen with streaming services such as Amazon Prime.

This can make satellite an expensive option when it comes to an IoT application, though there are established companies that are trying to bridge that gap. However, the reality is said to be that only fifteen per cent of the planet is covered by affordable, accessible IoT connections.

OK, that is a big claim, and “affordable” is a very vague term. I will come back to that in a minute.

How this is changing is with so-called nano-satellites, small, cheaper satellites that can still provide coverage good enough for the small data rates associated with IoT, but at less cost.

One company exploring that market is Swiss firm Astrocast and I caught up this week with its chief operating officer Laurent Vieira de Mello. It currently has ten satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) with plans to reach eventually eighty to one hundred, with five to ten of those this year.

Despite reserving its next two launches, he said this year’s number is a little bit uncertain due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Even though Astrocast does not use the Russian Soyuz launch vehicles itself, many others do and they are switching to launch vehicles produced by other countries, which is making it difficult for smaller companies such as Astrocast to book space. 

“We may face some delays,” said Mello. “We are also dealing with the electronic component crisis. It was not easy before, but Ukraine produces a lot of neon gas used in these components.” Although, he added later that Astrocast’s electronics partner, Flex, is supporting it by successfully navigating through this component crisis, which is also affecting most other players across the globe. 

Astrocast launched its service this year but Mello admitted that the small number of satellites could cause some latency problems for some very remote applications. At the moment, it can be up to eighteen hours before a device will contact a satellite though the norm is less than two hours and it can be down to seconds. Nevertheless, this is not yet good enough and Mello said once the full constellation was up there, the gap would be a maximum of fifteen minutes.

So, why would anyone use this when there are these existing big satellites already in orbit providing really good coverage. The answer is what I mentioned earlier – affordability. Mello reckons that modules for some of the bigger satellite companies can be more than $100; Astrocast modules range from $50 to $80 and even less in volume. These are not end devices but modules that integrate into other equipment. The company also has some low-cost data rates geared to IoT-type applications.

Astrocast keeps its costs down by using automotive rather than space-grade components for the satellites and off-the-shelf components for the modules.

He also said being a small company – it has around 85 employees – means it can be more agile for adapting to its customers’ needs.

“The problem with relying on big legacy satellite providers is they are not competitive on price and are not very agile,” said Mello. “That is agile in the way they can address customer needs for IoT applications.”

Now Mello reckons all this will lead to 2022 being a watershed year for satellite IoT, and I hope he is right, but the uncertainty caused by the war has put a lot up in the air at the moment, but nice to see some potential good news on the horizon. Fingers crossed that Mello gets his satellites built and launched, and increases the scope for affordable (it’s that word again) IoT applications.