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Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT

swarm.space

51–60 of 165 posts

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

#51
post #46

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...!

Not likely with those data rates, for better or worse

Data will get cheaper, fast

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

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Critical applications that are only sending one data point per hour. It's limited to 750 packets per month.

Your hardware can record many datapoints, and bundle them up together into one packet for transmission in one big bundle. If you are reading a float off a sensor, you can get nearly 1 data point per minute, transmitted hourly, with a very naive implementation.

Much more with compression specialized to your use case and clever packet design.

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

#54

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, oxygen levels, BMI, etc.

I frankly don't think it can get much more intrusive.

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

#55
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?

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!

Not to mention that people could have internet connected crap without even knowing it. No way to block it using PiHole, pfsense or other local routers and access points.

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

#56
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.

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

#57
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Not to mention that people could have internet connected crap without even knowing it. No way to block it using PiHole, pfsense or other local routers and access points.

Given there's mobile service where most people are spending time, this situation is already much worse with cellular data b/c of the substantially higher bandwidth capability.

eg https://marketplace.att.com/products/att-iot-dataplans-lte-n...

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

#59

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.

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

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

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

#60
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.
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