Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

High. At least if it's anything like Iridium, probably seconds to minutes depending on coverage. Really not designed to be used like general purpose networking.

jobigoud3• 4 years ago

Roughly 0.44 bits/s. Data is 750 packets of 192 bytes per month on the $5 plan.

notfried• 4 years ago

I love how they define "activation date" for the data plan!

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.

exhilaration• 4 years ago

So 50 messages for testing and calibration before they charge you? I wish all wireless providers were this nice.

arriu2• 4 years ago

Minimum order of 25, so roughly $3725 for one year unless you get the "eval kit" @ $449.

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

MuffinFlavored• 4 years ago

What might somebody (or some company) use this for?

192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?

eterevsky• 4 years ago

Weather station or any kind of remote sensor that you want to keep in some remote area.

bredren• 4 years ago

I worked on a project for a carrier focused on monitoring temperature of seafood (oysters to start) from water to store.

They were anticipating some legislation that would require full auditability of supply chain.

jcims5• 4 years ago

Given the low cost and power requirements of LoRa this could be fantastic wildlife and natural habitat monitoring. Could act as a backup emergency contact mechanism for folks that spend a lot of time away from civilization.

Hopefully some resellers pop up that let you buy them onesie-twosie to tinker with.

_jal• 4 years ago

Security is an obvious use.

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.

themgt• 4 years ago

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, lists Swarm Technologies as one of their startups.

I bet the military/intelligence community has all sorts of ideas!

jgalt212• 4 years ago

It's a perfect fit for the Yo app.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

skykooler• 4 years ago

I could see this being very useful for scientific beacons, for example to track ocean currents or bird migrations. The latter currently use cellular connections, but can only track birds through areas where reception is present.

initplus9• 4 years ago

Remote communication in places without cellular connectivity. Air quality, water quality, remote weather stations, aviation, industrial applications... Latency anywhere from a few seconds to minutes. Not used like normal networking, it's something you build around for very specialized applications.

proee• 4 years ago

How about for check points on an ultra-marathon desert run, where you are crossing the Sahara. Each check point could have an RFID reader that gives feedback on the racers. If Bob doesn't get to the next checkpoint in say 2 hours, you know he's probably lost.

nwatson• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, command and control for terrorist drone networks, sending coordinates to low-use credit-card gas pumps for night-time refills, and coordinates to targets. Give it ten years.

Retric2• 4 years ago

Hourly data collection for science like stream gages, earthquakes, air quality, precipitation, or similar in very remote areas.

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.

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

It's ideal for asset tracking - you can fit a GPS fix, timestamp, and accuracy estimate (based on # of satellites visible) into 12 bytes, which is enough to ping once per minute and still only use half your allocated bandwidth. If your asset tags call in every 5 minutes or once per hour lots of options open up.

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.

LeafItAlone• 4 years ago

A good use of IOT is agriculture. At proper cost, having satellite connected devices across huge sprawling farms would be extremely useful. There are already solutions, like LoRA, but these have their own disadvantages.

nl• 4 years ago

I met a person who runs a competitor with similar restrictions.

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.

metadat• 4 years ago

This seems like a surprisingly small amount of data in this day and age of connectedness.

I wonder how much total bandwidth each of these satellites can push per month. Anyone know the backend aggregate sustained data rate per sat?

reaperducer4• 4 years ago

Provides 750 data packets per device per month (up to 192 Bytes per packet)

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.

arriu2• 4 years ago

I love this type of tech and want to get in on that sweet 144,000 bytes of data at 5 per month, but... it's not just 5 per month, it's a minimum investment of 500 unfortunately.

Also, not sure where to find a decent Commodore system these days to utilize this plan :)

moralestapia3• 4 years ago

Sure, but 40 years have passed since then and 144K peanuts for any real world application.

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.

ge96• 4 years ago

Curious how it compares to Iridium, I've seen those with Sparkfun

initplus9• 4 years ago

I don't have numbers in front of me but it looks waaay cheaper. Seems they are trying to undercut Iridium SBD on price.

cozzyd• 4 years ago

It's significantly cheaper but also in a frequency range that likely requires a bigger antenna.

pmorici2• 4 years ago

Order of magnitude less expensive.

I_dev_outdoors• 4 years ago

There's also a sparkfun dev board linked from that page which is around $150. It mentions that if ordering less than 25

eternityforest2• 4 years ago

Sparkfun has evaluated boards for $149 although they are SparkX experimental and could go away.

Could always do a groupgets anyway.

tspike• 4 years ago

This looks like a fantastic tool for ensuring the obsolescence of privacy.

shswkna• 4 years ago

This product is not for attaching to people, but things that you actually want to be tracked.

UncleEntity• 4 years ago

This product is not for attaching to people, but things that you actually want to be tracked...

…like people’s cars.

Not that I think the sky is falling and this is the end of privacy or anything.

multiplegeorges• 4 years ago

Is this a new offering released today?

krm01• 4 years ago

Any idea what the speeds are going to be, especially when compared to connecting IOT devices to a Cellular network?

dsr_• 4 years ago

Under 150KB per month, $5.

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.

THENATHE• 4 years ago

With numbers like that, this seems completely useless except for all but the most wildly specific of applications

idiotsecant2• 4 years ago

this is actually really great for applications like tracking, remote instrumentation, and other services that have a small amount of relatively important data in hard-to-service or critical applications which is not that wildly specific.

googlryas4• 4 years ago

You aren't going to be streaming video from the Atacama through this but it is no where near useless. 192 bytes is actually substantial amount of data depending on what you're interested in.

kube-system3• 4 years ago

It's for global IoT connectivity, just as it says. That is a very specific application.

panick21_4• 4 years ago

In the past this cost even more.

girvo8• 4 years ago

Our use case is industrial IoT sensing in extremely remote deployments.

jcims5• 4 years ago

I can't get to their documentation but it looks like it's using LoRa for the RF.

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.

googlryas4• 4 years ago

Yep, it seems like you get a transmit window every ~2 hours max. All in all this service is much more reasonable(cost/antenna size/transmit rate/power) than I expected. You can basically send 2kb/day from a large chunk of the world(with a view of the sky) for $5/mo. Somehow even cheaper than m2m cell plans I've encountered, though granted I haven't looked at services in the past few years.

delabay3• 4 years ago

Helium has a competitive Lora network at 100x less cost, in western Europe and US.

Ducks

SideburnsOfDoom• 4 years ago

Unrelated to Bruce Sterling's Space Swarm https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Swarm.pdf

NoImmatureAdHom4• 4 years ago

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...!

mmazing2• 4 years ago

Not likely with those data rates, for better or worse

frenchie4111• 4 years ago

Data will get cheaper, fast

citilife• 4 years ago

You're already carrying around a device that monitors your location, what you are saying (and audio in the surrounding area), to some extent how you are moving (gyroscope), your data ingress and egress patterns and where you share virtually all your public thoughts (and most private thoughts).

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.

jlmorton• 4 years ago

While that's true, I have a little bit of faith in Apple and Google. But how about the $18 humidifier I bought on Amazon?

NoImmatureAdHom4• 4 years ago

This strikes me as defeatist. You can run GrapheneOS and pipe everything through VPNs for your phone. It's really easy, the phone does all the normal stuff except the constant listening ("assistant") thing, and it's way harder for anyone interested to spy on me. I don't run Google or Apple software.

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.

kube-system3• 4 years ago

People's appliances are almost all within range of cellular connectivity, which is cheaper and higher bandwidth.

NoImmatureAdHom4• 4 years ago

LoRa's much lower energy, maybe? I can see cell networks if it's plugged in. Or maybe cell radios are cheap enough that you could put one in and fire it up once a day to squirt out data on how to better sell your kids sugary cereals...

bagels• 4 years ago

This is already possible with cell connectivity. Many cars have this now, for instance. Nothing is stopping the telcos from offering something to compete with this other than in remote tower-free locations.

landemva2• 4 years ago

And heavy equipment had this available years ago. One-time fee up front and good for the life of the machine. Can be installed in any type of machine. Worldwide GSM and can send commands to the machine. Was around USD$1500, IIRC. https://www.komatsu.eu/en/komtrax

I literally watched a large excavator from a dealer break sanctions and show up digging in Iran.

NoImmatureAdHom4• 4 years ago

If anyone has a lead on which new cars don't call home lmk

pnemonic• 4 years ago

SpaceX

Ignored completely. Musk was cool until he opened his mouth all the way.

panick21_4• 4 years ago

Musk has literally been saying tons of stuff an talking a lot for 15 years.

csmarshall• 4 years ago

So this is a division of spacex? Since that's where there "careers" page goes right.

alsodumb• 4 years ago

SpaceX acquired them last year.

H1Supreme• 4 years ago

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.

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.

googlryas4• 4 years ago

You get a REST API to to query to get your data.

Eg GET api.swarm.space/devices/$id/recent

jcims5• 4 years ago

Looks like they have a SaaS product called Hive to poll/push data from devices to your application. I don't see any indication of point to point message passing capability but it may exist.

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

You dont buy a sattelite terminal yourself , they company has their own terminal and will make it avaliable to you over an API

initplus9• 4 years ago

Downlink is internal to the sat provider, and will just send messages on to you over the ordinary internet.

ec109685• 4 years ago

Surprised dedicated ultra low bandwidth satellites are the way to go when developing a service like this versus piggybacking on something like StarLink.

jjtheblunt2• 4 years ago

It is SpaceX also, so presumably in some regard piggybacks on StarLink.

girvo8• 4 years ago

No. It was purchased by SpaceX last year, but uses their own hardware.

jcims5• 4 years ago

This was a separate company originally. In this case the RF protocol is completely different (~140MHz vs 12+GHz) as well so you'd have to add hardware to the StarLink satellite to support this (which obv. could be done moving forward)

peterweyand• 4 years ago

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.

djmanning• 4 years ago

You can purchase a single breakout board from Sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19236

NKosmatos• 4 years ago

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.

We’ll see many new things and interesting technologies in the coming years, like this one and also the one in iPhones.

initplus9• 4 years ago

ADS-B is essentially mandatory nowadays, but it's just a radio that transmits location to others in the same local area. Get enough volunteers with receivers spread throughout the world and you do get real time location tracking of every aircraft. See https://www.adsbexchange.com/

Integer• 4 years ago

ADS-B is mandatory these days, and Aireon [1] has a constellation of satellite receivers for 24/7 global coverage.

[1]https://aireon.com/

landemva2• 4 years ago

Yet another mandatory cost for what potential gain?

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_...

mirashii• 4 years ago

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.

https://spacenews.com/swarm-ceo-talks-past-mistakes-future-g...

elxx• 4 years ago

Same, it's weird that this hasn't already been mentioned. They launched untrackable trash into space and got fined for it, nobody should trust this company.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-satellite-fine/fcc-fi...

qchris• 4 years ago

It drives me up a wall that they got off basically consequence-free for that--I'm guess they probably made up the fine in reduced time cost spent on authorization proceedings anyway. "Move fast and break things" isn't a great motto anyway, but it's especially bad when those things are floating around in orbit.

iamgopal• 4 years ago

Wouldn’t ham radio works ? I thought by now those would be miniature enough to be used for IOT ?

tlrobinson• 4 years ago

Two main reasons:

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.

mrlambchop• 4 years ago

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.

(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.

unsung• 4 years ago

Have you tried panel mounting the antenna on a big (at least 4 sq ft) ground plane? We use these at work and had a very hard time until we started building nice big ground planes into all mechanical designs (that and reading the design advice on the decoupling network with a microscope).

StanAngeloff• 4 years ago

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.

I suspect there is some underlying issue with these high-latency / low-bandwidth solutions that just makes them impractical in real life.

[1] https://hiber.global/hiberhilo/

kavalg2• 4 years ago

I see some possible problems:

- 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).

plgonzalezrx8• 4 years ago

Why would you need a satellite connection in an urban environment?

kavalg2• 4 years ago

There are some things that make urban IoT connectivity harder than in the open field.

- 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.

kkoste• 4 years ago

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

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?

solarkraft• 4 years ago

Swarm uses a narrow band carrier (about 40 kHz wide), and a chirped spread spectrum approach

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.

Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

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