The Next IoT Frontier: Satellite Meets Cellular

Satellite networks are revolutionizing how IoT devices stay connected in remote and underserved areas. In this episode, we explore the transformative power of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) NB-IoT satellites and open standards with Sateliot CTO and Co-Founder Marco Guadalupi. Discover how Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) and agnostic multi-RAT connectivity, powered by the new 3GPP Release 17 (Rel.17) standard, are unlocking innovative IoT use cases across industries, from smart agriculture to disaster recovery.

1. The advantages of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) 5G / NB-IoT satellites for reducing latency and improving connectivity.
2. How open standards eliminate vendor lock-in, ensuring flexibility and scalability for IoT deployments.
3. Eseye and Sateliot’s new partnership to integrate satellite and terrestrial connectivity.
4. Real-world applications of satellite IoT in industries like logistics, agriculture, and disaster recovery.

Join us to uncover the key advancements, challenges, and opportunities shaping the future of global IoT connectivity.

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Transcript

You are listening to IoT Leaders, a podcast from Eseye that shares real IoT stories from the field about digital transformation, swings and misses, lessons learned and innovation strategies that work. In each episode, you’ll hear our conversations with top digitization leaders on how IoT is changing the world for the better. Let IoT leaders be your guide to IoT digital transformation and innovation. Let’s get into the show.

Nick Earle (00:38):

So welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast with me, your host Nick Earle, the CEO of Eseye. And the reason if you’re watching this on YouTube, the reason I’ve got a picture of Planet Earth behind me is I thought that was the most appropriate background for today’s subject. Today’s guest is from a very exciting company called Sateliot, they are one of the new satellite companies that are doing non-terrestrial trial networks and low earth orbit, so LEO, as it’s known. They actually have satellites up in the sky now, they have paying customers and we just announced a partnership with them so that our solution, our Infinity platform, our switch, can actually switch between cellular choice and satellite choice because now with the new standards, the GSMA standards, which you’ll hear about the podcast, we now can actually use the same modem with new firmware in the modem to connect either to cellular or to satellite.

(01:42):

And that is a huge breakthrough which suddenly makes global ubiquitous connectivity, which is what certainly we’re all about even bigger. And you hear a lot here about use cases and technology and differences between the different models that are out there. It’s a very informative podcast. The guest is Marco Guadalupi. He is the CTO, Chief Technical Officer of Sateliot, and he’s very knowledgeable, very enthusiastic, and also talking about what’s coming next, the different standards, the path to 6G, what 6G is and how satellite solves the problem of IoT connectivity in rural areas, case study of shipping containers with our joint customer that we already have obviously out on the oceans. A whole new exciting world opening up in front of us. Now the satellites are actually flying above our heads. So with that, without further ado, let’s get started and let’s hear from Marco Guadalupi, the CTO of Sateliot. Marco, welcome to the IoT Leaders podcast. Nice to meet you.

Marco Guadalupi (02:49):

Nice to meet you. Thank you very much for the invite.

Nick Earle (02:54):

Very welcome. Our listeners listen to it on devices but it also goes out on YouTube. Maybe we could just start off by you introducing yourself and indeed the company Sateliot, which is very exciting. But yeah, it’s who you are, what your role is and a little bit about Sateliot.

Marco Guadalupi (03:13):

Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Marco Guadalupi. I’m the CTO and co-founder of Sateliot. Basically what we did in Sateliot is very easy. The end is innovation and how we want to coordinate how we want to offer coverage, but what we are doing is extending the coverage of mobile operator that everybody knows that are in the city are also in rural area, but when the density of population drop or we are in the middle of the ocean or we are in very rural area, what’s happened is that we don’t have coverage. So we decided to extend their coverage using satellite in low orbit. We can talk later about that.

Nick Earle (03:57):

So let’s get some of the key acronyms out of the way for people because I think if it’s okay, I’d like to go into that point about low orbit now if we can, because there’s lots of different systems out there. There’s a lot of companies making a lot of claims, but you are totally, as I understand it, you’re totally focused on the phrases LEO versus GEO, so low earth orbiting and there are some technical reasons why you think that’s really important. Maybe you could just go straight into that.

Marco Guadalupi (04:22):

Yes, yes. Until now. We was used to for example, watching TV connected to an antenna and sometimes this antenna is connected to a satellite. We have a dish in our houses receiving signal from a satellite that is very far from the earth. It’s positioned in 36,000 kilometers and this is very efficient to offer broadcast because these satellites are positioned in an orbit. It’s called orbit. That’s because the movement of the earth and the movement of the satellite seems to us that’s always in the same position. This is called GEO stationary satellite. We use this satellite during many years for TV, for broadcast TV. So we are covering a specific part of the globe. For example, Europe for example, Africa, then in the past people starting offering internet access through this satellite. But what happened when we want to go further to this approach because we want to connect object Internet of Things like our case.

(05:25):

We want to coordinate small devices to do a lot of use cases. We’ll see later these small devices maybe are on the floor, maybe are beyond the rock, beyond tree, maybe are on the move. So the position of these devices compared to the satellite is continually changing. What happened with GEO, you have to look to the equator where the satellites are positioning. The position of each satellite is on the equator line that allow us to have this relative position fixed. But when we move is or we are in different latitude of the globe or we are in a container for example, it’s difficult to point our element that we want to connect exactly to the satellite. So envision this situation, we decided to modify the approach and we choose satellite that fly at a different orbit that is called Low Earth Orbit (LEO). It means satellite that can fly between few hundred kilometers to 2000 kilometers.

(06:39):

For example, in our case we decide to fly our satellite at 500 kilometers. So if we have for example a cow connected, depend where the cow is, there is no visibility to the equator but the satellite is moving around the earth because at this altitude satellites move at 7.5 kilometer per second – very quickly. So maybe the cow is behind the tree, behind the rock, behind the house. But when the satellite moves in some moments, we can see the object. We can establish this direct vision between the satellite and the element that we want to connect. Thanks to LEO approach we can increase the capability to establish connection and then because we are very near the earth, we can increase the energy, so the power of the signal that we receive. So that concept of out of coverage can be solved in this way

Nick Earle (07:42):

And presumably that was a great explanation with the cow. Thank you presumably, and we’ll get into use cases later on. In fact, we already have a common customer. We’ll talk about that later on. But presumably the fact that you are near the earth, you talked about the energy but also the latency is less. You’ve got to take the signal, you’ve got to go up and down or down and up actually. So you must have a latency advantage as well by this approach.

Marco Guadalupi (08:07):

Yes, yes,

(08:08):

Yes. Latency is reduced to few milliseconds compared to GEO satellite. To go to GEO satellite in coming back, we are around 700 millisecond, 700 millisecond in GEO. We can stay around in LEO, we can stay around 80 millisecond, 50 millisecond, 70 millisecond. We can reduce a lot and we can reach 20 millisecond too. It depend on how you approach the natural, but yes, you can reduce a lot. It’s a matter of few milliseconds because we are flying at 500-600 kilometers. So there is a huge difference compared to 30,000 kilometer and then you have to go and coming back. So there is a big advantage for example, to browse the internet. So for broadband access working with satellites like LEO, you reduce a lot and the perception of the service for the user improves a lot because the latency is a key element in this connectivity.

Nick Earle (09:07):

Excellent. Now I’ve no doubt a lot of people will be in their mind and they’ll say, okay, so what about Starlink? People always say, okay, but it sounds like Starlink, but from my perspective actually that’s also low earth orbiting. But Starlink, there are some really key differences. I think that one in particular, Starlink is very much aimed at the consumer side and that’s the big market, rural consumer broadband access and secondly, and Europe, very much we’re talking today about IoT and we’ll get back to that and also Starlink, there’s the whole issue of open versus proprietary standards, isn’t there?

Marco Guadalupi (09:45):

Yes, Starlink, first of all, Starlink is a broadband service from LEO setting improve the latency. That’s a key point is a broadband. Now they’re talking about connecting smartphone, but in any case always is proprietary solution. Okay? The approach that Starlink chose was proprietary solution. So their technology is owned by them, is implemented by them, they know the details and there is a level of captivity for the customer. There is a level of technology lock in for the customer. Our approach is different or we join an organization called 3GPP that is in charge of telecommunication protocol, mobile telecommunication protocol with the idea to bring a mobile protocol that are open standard to space. In this approach supported also by the European Space Agency and many other organizations in the world, the architecture, the protocol, the futures involved in this communication are totally open, are totally new by all the players.

(10:52):

And then the customer can be a company, can be an enterprise, can be a government, can be a residential user, can be connected to a network in some way that if we want to decide to change the operator because a new service, because a new product, we can do that without changing the terminal device. The end user is free. You are protecting your investment when you buy your device and the approach is always based, not on my protocol is better, your protocol is worth no, the differentiation is in the service. So all the ecosystem is focused on offering the best service to the end user and not competing with “I have the best protocol, I have this device”. No, the device is open, everybody can build the devices that can support this non-terrestrial network communication based on mobile protocol. And then the operator offers this service, this characteristic at that price.

(11:57):

So the end user can choose when you work in other proprietary solution like Starlink, Iridium and so on, what we are doing is a lock-in. You buy a device that only works with that company, there is an activity, the customer has to accept any rules that the operator imposes. So it’s breaking these architectural on terrestrial networks is normal. Everybody has a phone. If you want to change the operator because there is a new service, you do that. It is normal approach. Why we don’t do that also in space. So that was the approach of Sateliot.

Nick Earle (12:32):

And I think that is a really key point. So let’s go a little bit deeper. You mentioned that non-terrestrial networks or NTN as it’s known and the industry standard. And I’ll come back to the fact that we as Eseye we’re about to, in fact by the time this podcast goes out, we probably have already had our press announcement out and I’ll come back to what that’s about, the alliance between the two companies. But the standards, I understand it is also linked to 5G, isn’t it? It’s the 5G NTN Narrowband IoT protocol and that standard is really important. As you say, it’s not proprietary, it’s not a lock-in and I believe you’ve been involved in committees and et cetera on that. Yes. So maybe a little bit explanation as people will, they’ll be planning for 5G, the operators will be planning for 5G, the customers will be looking at use cases.

(13:24):

We know there are major issues to do with narrowband IoT amongst operators just because particularly and I’ve talked about this on previous podcasts, the model for roaming in cellular IoT is that the person you roam onto only gets 20% of the revenue that you get. And the problem is with narrowband, the unit costs are very low, which means you’re getting 20% of a really low number. So a lot of people are saying, although technically I can do narrowband, I can’t afford to do narrowband from my cell tower infrastructure, my land-based, my terrestrial network as opposed to my non-terrestrial network. Whereas from your perspective, the idea of having narrowband IoT globally and linked to 5G, and there’s a lot of issues to do with the billing such as the billing charging evolution standard, which is the new billing standard for 5G. You are building it all around those open standards, aren’t you?

Marco Guadalupi (14:22):

Yes, yes, that’s true. And that’s the beauty working to 3GPP. First of all, there are many building blocks of the system that already exist. I don’t have to think on the concept of how to authenticate the device because there is a SIM card, that’s part of the standard. This is the 5G standard. I want to extend coverage of mobile operators so I don’t have to think on how to create this interface. No, because there is a roaming interface already well-defined, taking these elements exactly. We can extend the coverage all around the globe. We can reduce the cost of doing this roaming thanks to the new approach proposed by GSMA, an operator that has NB-IoT service on the ground can go beyond it’s region thanks to Sateliot and avoiding extra cost of the roaming because we are doing exactly the same interface that we see in terrestrial networks with a simple approach because it’s IoT, so the information we have to interchange is very simple.

(15:30):

Our core network is a standard mobile core network. It talks to a specific protocol and to do that there is in the middle a transport network for cleaning is called cleaning house for interconnection between mobile operator and everything is straightforward. There is no extra cost on that for the mobile operator, it’s a new revenue stream sensor that can be connected beyond my network. Okay, welcome. There is an income. Okay, perfect. And they don’t have to invest anything. It’s quite good. And the cost of roaming is reduced to almost nothing because the integration is so simple based on few files that you have to move up and down that there is no motivation to block this extension of your network.

Nick Earle (16:17):

And we should say if it’s not obvious, but we should specifically state that it’s not theoretical. You have recently launched satellites. These satellites are in the air now and you have customers, many customers will get onto that. But you have piggybacked on, as I understand it, one of Mr. Musk’s rockets and you have satellites in the air right now.

Marco Guadalupi (16:38):

August 16 we launched the first orbital plane for a commercial implementation with four satellites. It was a very nice mission. We bring the satellite to Germany, to Berlin, where we integrated the satellite inside the box that is called Deployer. And then we move the Deployer to California to the space port at Vandenberg and we installed these boxes, this Deployer inside a rocket – a Falcon 9 ready to be launched. And finally August 16 the satellite reached almost 600 kilometers. They were deployed in two phases, the first phase satellites and then after one minute and something the other second, third and fourth satellite. So we saw our satellites flying around the earth in two groups and day by day they start moving. Our satellite has a proportion system. The idea is to move this satellite around the globe in one orbit, 90 degree relative position between each of them.

(17:47):

And that’s configuration of the orbit and that configuration of the constellation crossing North Pole and South Pole every 90 minutes gives us the possibility to offer a minimum of one message per day all around the globe. It’s a 5G NB-IoT non-terrestrial network portal. This is based on release 17 of the standard. On the ground we have all the ground system to establish the connection to the mobile operator. The mission control center that is controlling the housekeeping of the satellite every day with different connections. These satellites are connected to the ground through a bunch of ground stations all around the globe that we can use to establish bidirectional connection with the satellite. We’ll skip the satellite to control the flight to avoid collision. That’s one of the important points today. Avoid collision with debris in space. The proportion system allows us to move this satellite if needed and finally to offer the service. So we have to move up and down IoT messaging from our customer and mobile operator and the end user, our customer or mobile operator. So everything is ready to be commercial January, 2025 as we always said. And this is a reality, okay? It’s not a protocol on the paper. This is a real implementation of the system with all the elements included.

Nick Earle (19:17):

So just coming back to our how if I may, I had an image as you were talking. The way you can connect to that cow wherever he or she is you have four satellites currently. Obviously a lot more in the future, but four satellites currently. As you said, there are 90 degrees to each other going over the North and the South Poles. So have this image of almost chopping an orange into four parts, but you’ve got the rotation of the earth as well. So the combination of those four slices and the fact that the earth is rotating gives you, you touch every bit of territory globally to that in a case study including the oceans once a day. So right now you can definitely do once a day communication. It’s only going to get better as it scales.

Nick Earle (20:19):

So what I’d like to do now that we’ve established, that was a really great explanation, thank you. We talk a little bit about the announcement that as I say, it could be out already by the time the podcast launches. And as to why we did it, our regular listeners will know that I’m always mentioning our approaches, we call it the Star Alliance. We’re actually talking the airline analogy, not the space analogy, but the star alliance model where we have 16 operators that we have done different technical interconnects to. But essentially what it means that as our switch, our network switch in our cloud platform, Infinity, can do not only roaming, so we get access to all the roaming agreements for those 16 operators. So we have 700 roaming, probably 780 or something roaming agreements. But we also can do what’s called federated localization so we can localize the connection as well as roam.

(21:11):

So essentially we’re agnostic to the operator. So we have a single eSIM, we don’t have a dog in the fight. We’re agnostic to the operator, which gives the most choice, the most coverage and the most assurance that you’re not going to get disconnected. But what we’re saying now in terms of the next phase of our strategy is we want to move to be agnostic to the RATs, the radio access type. And we can already do WiFi for instance in the device like we do with vending machines. If you’re in a store and the store WiFi is good enough then use WiFi. But we couldn’t cover rural areas and we couldn’t where there’s just the economic model doesn’t make sense to put the towers there and we couldn’t cover obviously the ocean unless you’re very close to the port and there’s a huge market for tracking. So from our strategy, what we see is we want to be agnostic to the operator but we also want to be agnostic to the device and the thing that’s, excuse me, to the RAT within a single device. And the thing that has enabled this for both of us of course is this release 17 standard, which I find that most people don’t know what it is. If I say we can use release 17, it’s not a snappily named thing. It’s obviously come from telecom.

Marco Guadalupi (22:30):

Yes.

Nick Earle (22:31):

To have a name like that. But essentially I think that the simple guide is that it is essentially means your existing cellular modem in your device, which as you say could be a phone but actually in the IoT world is most often not a phone, it’s a device with a cellular modem in can now actually connect the buyer. Our switch in this case with the announcement that we’re making to your satellites, which suddenly means that if you have intelligence in the device, you can actually choose between whether you want to use satellite or cellular. We have applications called SMARTconnect that runs in the device. Say if satellite is available and certain other parameters, it could be the latency or whatever, then use it or if cellular is available, then pick an operator that has these capabilities. Suddenly you get this opportunity for what we’ve all been talking about for a while of massive IoT, which it means that you have more and more choices to every device regardless of where that device is. And so I think the two companies are coming at this together with a common belief based on industry standards and agnostic choice. And that’s the way we see the world.

Marco Guadalupi (23:48):

Yes,

(23:50):

Yes, yes, it’s true. And the advantage to have standard at the end, you want to be agnostic to the RAT and you want to have a very cost effective device. So if you can have a minimum number of radio technologies inside the device, you can control the cost of the device, you can reduce the cost of the device. If for every RAT you need to install a different radio chain in your device, your price increases. Okay? So nowadays what we saw until the few years ago was proprietary solution to connect by satellite. Satellite is not something that appeared yesterday. Satellite exists during the last 40 years, but connectivity was expensive because was proprietary. The point here is to break these barriers to reduce the cost and to reduce the cost, we need massive adoption. If we join IoT use cases by satellite with the use cases for terrestrial network using the same radio, what we are doing is increasing the market of the device. So reducing the cost of the device in a seamless way. We move between different RAT, same device, one chain, one protocol, one firmware, one software. And that is scale.

Nick Earle (25:08):

And that is the other big subject I wanted to refer to. I think it opens the door for us to talk about case studies, but when I talk to people about satellite, sure it’s the same for you. Everybody they say, oh yes, but expensive. And as you say, if you are a proprietary model with a proprietary receiver, proprietary base stations that yeah your capital cost is expensive and you really have to massively scale, but the moment you say you’ve already got the device, it’s software, it’s firmware inside your IoT device, then you suddenly have an addressable market of billions and billions of devices without the need to spend $600 on a dish or something like that.

(25:53):

Let’s talk about case studies and I’m going to go straight into one that’s on your website. It’s on our website. And keen listeners of this podcast, IoT Leaders may well remember that we did a podcast with a company called t42 out of Israel and t42 do one of their verticals that they go after their device company or a device expertise, very smart Israeli engineers and one of the things that they do is that they’re trying to solve the problem of not just tracking containers while they’re at sea, but also there’s some amazing statistics that there’s something like 50 billion of losses from containers every year, which is either down to theft or the physical conditions. So not right, it gets too hot in the container because by the time they leave port and by the time they get there each container is not connected.

(26:44):

And so if it takes 12 days to get somewhere and you’re carrying food or whatever, it could get hot. Somebody could break open the lock on a container while they’re on the ship. They could tamper with it, a container could fall off, container could get stolen, it could be could be on another boat, but you just not think about it until it gets to the other end. And 99% of the containers in the world are not tracked today. Massive opportunity. And they’ve created this smart lock which creates an alert and will allow you to track the containers. For instance, when you take them off the boat and you put them on the ground at the port, ports are big because they need space to put hundreds of thousands of. It’s not just the boats that are big. The ports have to be big because they have to put the containers on the ground and then the lorries have to come in and they have to find the containers and put them on the lorry, the logistics and typically ports are at the hearts of cities, which is massively expensive real estate. So the opportunity for ROI here is huge with that sort of background info.

(27:54):

They’re one of your customers aren’t you are enabling them to connect while at sea essentially.

Marco Guadalupi (27:59):

Yes, it’s true. Containers are a very important logistic. It’s a very big business where logistic information is everything and when you have massive connectivity, you are connecting all your containers. You can create value on that data. It’s not only what is the container, after that you can post process information of all your containers and you can identify whether you have a lack or you have a problem. So thanks to cloud processing and artificial intelligence algorithms are learning on that data. So you need a lot of data. You can improve your process, you can establish a different management of that container that is for the company is inactive asset today what you can do with the container, but you don’t know what you can do tomorrow with all the information that you can bring from the container.

(28:58):

There is a gap there that if you have a sensor at the right price, you have the connectivity at the right price and the right availability, you can exploit all this information to create new revenue streams, to reduce cost, to create new experiences for your end user. Who is buying that container, who is receiving the goods inside the container? This experience, if I buy something, it took one month to arrive is a problem, right? But if it can track, I feel better, right? This happen every day when you buy something in the city and somebody brings it to you. So this information creates also a new experience for the end user. All these aspects can be explored tomorrow. And t42 is a good example. This sensor needs connectivity, you don’t care which one but you need connectivity. NTN non-terrestrial network, 3GPP non-terrestrial network gives us this possibility. And if you have GEO, LEO, MEO, any kind of orbit, you can improve the probability to connect this sensor, to connect this tracker and have all the information you need when you need anytime, anywhere, any object. That’s the approach.

Nick Earle (30:07):

The ocean, which I think I’m right is two thirds of the world’s surface, but I might be wrong, but 99% of containers are not connected today. So totally an untapped market. But also we talk about rural areas where I said it’s not rural IoT – it’s a big issue if you’re tracking a truck that’s driving across the US, large parts of the US have no signal. It’s just not economic to have a land based infrastructure. Land-based network.

Marco Guadalupi (30:38):

Exactly, exactly. That’s true. And not only for tracking objects to track the asset, no, there are other use cases where it’s not economically feasible to deploy. Land network for example is also a very important business with IoT. For example, you can reduce 30-40% of water consumption in smart agriculture but you need information. What we did a couple of years ago, we opened a link in our webpage to invite companies that want to test the technology. We identify use cases from very different verticals. It’s incredible. There are use cases that you cannot believe. Because when you have a need, you have an idea and you create solution. And if you don’t have that need it’s difficult. No, but sometimes you saw application in smart agriculture. But what we we’re looking is the size of the fruit. So in each tree during the day, during the week, during the month, we are sizing the fruit. We are measuring the size of the apple for example.

(31:45):

Wow, what? It’s not mass of matter of temperature and soil. Hey there is water temporary, but what happened to the apple? We want to know what happened to the apple. So there is a sensor that just take the size of the apple. No it’s but in know one tree, in every tree you need to know the size of the apple in every tree. It’s great. So in this web page people can join the experience, can join, can ask for a proof of concept, can ask to test the service. And we saw application in vertical in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the land pipeline for example, for water transport soil, for example for energy. So you have infrastructure in the middle of nowhere.

(32:34):

So you have pipe to transport this energy, you have to monitor all these infrastructure. Then you have environmental. Environmental is not a business as it is, but controlling the environmental is important for other company because there are a side effect. But if we see that water container in the mountain are empty during the summer, there is a risk for a fire and we have to be prepared. So why we don’t control water tank in the middle of nowhere, nowhere what we do today. We took a car, we take a car and check what’s happening in every mountain.

(33:15):

There is no, of course there is no coverage there. All these use cases associated to environmental has an impact on the society with big impact when something happens. So disaster, you can be prepared before the disaster and after the disaster. Again, satellite connectivity, if you stay beyond the land network after disaster, the first network will lose is power, intercommunication, communication. All these three infrastructure are lost. So helicopters because we have helicopters, we have satellite for communication, then we have to find a solution for power. Satellite communication didn’t need power on the ground. That’s why satellites are good also for disaster recovery. So if we can connect every smartphone for example, it’s fantastic because every people has a smartphone in the pocket and be connected directly to the satellite. To do that, again, we need the standard solution to avoid captivity based on one company, two, three companies, we need to open the solution. So use cases are huge, many use cases, use cases that you may know today, but tomorrow when you have the infrastructure you can create new use cases. So there is an intuitive process that can exploit when you add infrastructure.

Nick Earle (34:38):

One of the fascinating things about IoT is the use cases as you say. And again we did another podcast with funny enough, I’m going to come back to cows again. I just realized we did a podcast with a company in the agriculture space. They were actually nominated for a GSMA IoT project of the year award at Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona. And they are trying to track the health of every cow. And just to recap it, the biggest killer of cows is BRD, which is it’s basically a cow pneumonia and it kills about I think 12 or 13% of all cows in the year. And the thing about it is by the time the cow is sick, it’s too late and cows infected, other cows and cows tend to be in rural areas and what you can actually identify seven days earlier that a cow is sick because it changes its behavior, it doesn’t eat and drink as much and initially its in the middle of the herd and then when it’s really sick it goes to the outside of the herd.

(35:40):

It’s interesting what animals do anyway. So you have to monitor if you can monitor the cow’s position and how often they go to the water trough and the feeding trough, you can actually use analytics to say, and they all have a tag on with the number cow. Number 342 is exhibiting symptoms. So intercept that cow even though it looks perfectly healthy to the human eye because as you said, it’s people who go and check on electricity transformers and they’re cowboys, that’s why they’re called cowboys. It’s people on horses who are paid to look at cows. And so they don’t spend all the time rounding them up. They spend most of the time just looking at them. And you can then do that with Bluetooth and whatever on the water trough. But you have to get the data from the field out and if you’re in rural Montana and there’s no cellular phone signal, it just stops there.

(36:35):

So the use cases are phenomenal and I think it comes back to what we said is that you ain’t seen nothing yet in effect on IoT versus massive IoT. The moment you take these barriers down with an open interoperable solution which has choice on the RAT type, then we will see a massive explosion in IoT. Which brings me to perhaps the last question, I guess it’s what’s next? We’ve talked about the fact that what’s next is no shortage of use cases. We’re at the sort of one message a day. So it’s not every use case right now, it’s not video but technology advances all the time. So from your point of view business, you’ve launched satellites, you’re now commercial, you’ve got lots of customers. I see from your websites, we’ve got our partnership where we can now go into satellite multi-RAT and we have hundreds of customers, millions of devices, all of which could use this service. Can you say to the extent you can say, can you give some glimpse as to what the vision is for Sateliot going forward?

Marco Guadalupi (37:39):

Yeah. Yes, thank you. First of all, we have to consider how to grow the infrastructure. So we need more supply in space for sure to intensify the number of messages per day, the number of messages in a specific area for example, so this is the first orbital plane. It’s a minimum workable solution. We have something periodic cover all the globe. We have to add more orbital plane, more satellite orbital plane. In parallel, we have to push for the technology. So we are working a lot, we are investing a lot in the standard. Release 17 was frozen in June, 2022. This year, June 24 was frozen release 18 that bring a new enhancement to the protocol. Now we are working on release 19 and release 20. All these evolutions include, for example, new devices. We’re thinking we’re talking about a smartphone that can use the same IoT protocol to send small messaging.

(38:35):

Okay, SOS messaging, why not? But then we want to send any kind of message. We want to establish phone calls, we want to establish a video call. Why not? We want to browse. So all these evolution are considered. Sateliot has a very specific focus on IoT. Today is called ‘delay-tolerant’ IoT because we have few message per day. Tomorrow we want to approach the near real time. So message every few minutes and finally we can stay there. We have the technology to reach real time communication with IoT protocol. The difference is the size of the market. Maybe we stop ‘delay-tolerant’ IoT until a few minutes and we leave the rest for critical messaging to other players, it’s okay, it’s the same sensor, it’s the same protocol, it’s incentivized and the customer can choose to pay more for real time messaging and pay less for ‘delay-tolerant’ IoT. It’s a matter of sizing the product, sizing the market and offering the right service to your market. So next step, more satellite and more protocol contribution. We have a solid solution to cover as many use cases as possible.

Nick Earle (39:47):

And I would say totally new use cases that we haven’t even thought about yet is describing the transition to, I’ve been saying release 17, I now realize I should now say release 18 and then as you say 19/20, you’re describing in a world where instead of 5G being the big thing, now we’re into 3D networks that we haven’t been able to think about and 6G and suddenly it’s a completely different world with completely new use cases. And the idea of 3D networks is, and 6G is most people really struggle just to even wrap their heads around it at the moment.

Marco Guadalupi (40:27):

Yes, yes. 6G will include in their use cases, artificial intelligence from scratch. Networks need to use artificially intelligence to be operated for example, to understand the behavior of the customer, the behavior of the end user connected to the network. And it’s going to include non-terrestrial networks from scratch. In 5G, it was an evolution or at least 16 was 5G. And then we evolve including non-terrestrial network in 6G it is release 21. We are considering satellite non-terrestrial network hubs and satellite in different orbit. Drone has a part of the network. It’s another place where we can have a base station. And this base station is integrated in the core of the network contributing to the connectivity. So maybe we have a user that at the same time is connected to different network and for example in the night you can switch off the terrestrial infrastructure in some places because you have less traffic and you can use for global coverage, satellite connectivity for example, on the street between city, you don’t have base station, you just have enough all the base station and you just cover all these roads, all these paths through and non-terrestrial networks you can go near the border near the coast or in the middle of the city because on the street during the night there are no cars, there are no people.

(41:56):

So if you are outdoors, you can be connected from space. If you are indoors, you can receive signal from a few base stations because we just turn off all the others. It’s just an example with a big impact on the power consumption of this kind of network. So there are many use cases we can introduce when everything is interconnected. I did say always an example, the public warning system. It’s a way to send an SMS message to all population in a specific area. This is possible because it is a standard, when you have a problem, you call 112 in Europe, in every country in Europe you do 112. Also in North Pole you do 112. Thanks to this global approach based on the standard. So we’ve seen 6G more and more new services based on this full integration between all the networks.

Nick Earle (42:55):

And obviously I think you’re Spanish Marco and I think that’s a very topical subject, early warning systems for consumers and the change. So all of this is extremely relevant. I think we should wrap it here. I think this has been one of our more educational podcasts, so thank you. It’s a very exciting new area. We’ve been saying for a while we wanted to do a podcast on this and actually as a company wanting to do an alliance, but we were obviously waiting for the satellites to get up there and now they are, and we’re seeing the use cases and we’ve got some customers. I think it’s going to be very exciting going forward and there’s going to be many updates, as you say, as the standard evolves driven by the evolution of the standard, the whole industry will move in this direction. Very exciting. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, for being our latest partner. We’re partners now of each other and we look forward to exploring very exciting use cases with customers together with Sateliot, and I’m sure people who are listening to this, probably even now, tapping away at your website to actually find out a bit more. So thanks again for joining the podcast.

Marco Guadalupi (44:03):

Thank you very much. Thanks to the audience. Bye.

Nick Earle (44:05):

Thanks.

Outro

You’ve been listening to IoT Leaders featuring digitization leadership on the front lines of IoT. Our vision for this podcast is to be your guide to IoT and digital disruption, helping you to plot the right route to success. We hope today’s lessons, stories, strategies, and insights have changed your vision of IoT. Let us know how we’re doing by subscribing, rating, reviewing and recommending us. Thanks for listening. Until next time.