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Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

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Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#151

Post by girvo »

lxgr wrote: post #138
girvo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inmarsat is surprisingly more competitive to Swarm than we expected, but man it is difficult to get passed all the bullshit resellers, which is where Swarm is way easier. But for our use cases Inmarsat has been a better fit right now, though we use both on our board depending on the deployment: if we don’t need as much bandwidth and are okay with the black out times where we’re not covered by Swarm, it’s great

Interesting, I didn’t know Inmarsat offers IoT connectivity, or are you using regular BGAN (SMS or data)?

They do have Elera:

https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/enterprise/se...

But we’re using IDP as it’s not really out yet. Next year hopefully!

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#152

Post by aaron695 »

posguy wrote: post #116
kevmo314 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that explains why the marketing site looked so familiar.

Hasn't Helium shown that there is low demand for this type of IoT connectivity?

It's not even close to being global -

https://explorer.helium.com/

Ignoring exactly how effective a crypto it has been or will be.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#153

Post by Retric »

cma wrote: post #142
Retric wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 redunda…

Wouldn't a pipeline be ideal for a wire or fiber just by attaching it along it?

A wire like that is a single point of failure. Great for sending lots of data, but using two different systems is safer than using two different wires along the pipe, both of which could be severed in the same event.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#154

Post by reaperducer »

dfc wrote: post #122
reaperducer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silence sense and FCC-required logging for a mountaintop broadcast transmitter.

What is "silence sense"?

It's a circuit that alerts people to dead carriers.

People in radio station studios generally don't listen to the over-the-air signal because there is a delay. A silence sense is a circuit that monitors the over-the-air signal and takes action when it's been too quiet for too long. This is usually an indication that something has failed, either at the transmitter, or in the studio-transmitter link. It is sometimes triggered by dramatic pauses in classical music and talk show content, but in those cases is ignored by the DJ/host/producer.

They've been around forever, and can be made from simple analog circuits. In the stations where I've worked, if the silence sense activated, a red light lit up in the DJ booth, and the engineering department. Some stations had a secondary silence sense that would wait a bit longer, and light up a light bulb at the receptionist's desk because she had the master list of phone numbers to call the right people in case of a transmission failure.

There are thousands of radio station transmitters that are far enough away from the originating studio that it's not possible for the studio to hear the over-the-air signal, so a silence sense on top of a mountain, next to the transmitter could send an alert packet via this satellite service back to the studio to let someone know something is wrong.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#155

Post by HideousKojima »

UncleEntity wrote: post #102
shswkna wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Can already be done for a few orders of magnitude cheaper (and with several orders of magnitude more bandwidth) with a cellular connection. The people who want to track you/your data aren't going to use satellites, they're going to use Verizon or T-Mobile or AT&T.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#156

Post by sneak »

reaperducer wrote: post #154
dfc wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "silence sense"?

It's a circuit that alerts people to dead carriers. People in radio station studios generally don't listen to the over-the-air signal because there is a delay. A silence sense is a circuit that monitors the over-the-air signal and takes action when it's been too quiet for too long. This is usually an indication that something has failed, either at the transmitter, or in the studio-transmitter link. It is sometimes tr…

This service is high latency at present and only supports sending uplink data a half-dozen times per day when satellites are overhead. It would likely not be suitable for this application.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#157

Post by reaperducer »

sneak wrote: post #156
reaperducer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a circuit that alerts people to dead carriers. People in radio station studios generally don't listen to the over-the-air signal because there is a delay. A silence sense is a circuit that monitors the over-the-air signal and takes action when it's been too quiet for too long. This is usually an indication that something has failed, either at the transmitter, or in the studio-transmitter link. It is sometimes tr…

This service is high latency at present and only supports sending uplink data a half-dozen times per day when satellites are overhead. It would likely not be suitable for this application.

When it takes hours to days for someone to get from the station to the transmitter, the alert latency isn't a big concern.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#158

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

citilife wrote: post #54
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #40

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...!

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…

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.

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#159

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

kube-system wrote: post #73
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #40

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...!

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

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...

Re: Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

#160

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

bagels wrote: post #91
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #40

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...!

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.

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