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Swarm – Low cost, global satellite connectivity for IoT
- multiplegeorges 4y agoIs this a new offering released today?
- dsr_ 4y agoUnder 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 4y agoWith numbers like that, this seems completely useless except for all but the most wildly specific of applications
- panick21_ 4y agoIn the past this cost even more.
- idiotsecant 4y agothis 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.
- jobigoud 4y agoCritical applications that are only sending one data point per hour. It's limited to 750 packets per month.
- initplus 4y agoYour 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.
- panick21_ 4y agoYou can also aggregate some stuff on the sensor and the send the aggregations.
- googlryas 4y agoWhat do you mean 1 data point? It transmits bytes, not data points. I could easily stuff 60 temperature and humidity readings into one hourly 192b packet(ie per-minute weather data). That's 120 data points, not 1. And you could easily double that with simple differential encoding or beyond other compression techniques
- jobigoud 4y agoYeah what I meant to underline was that for a critical application you won't be able to react faster than one hour in case the data reports a critical issue. So not suitable for security or any application where you need less than one hour latency. I guess if you need satellite coms maybe the sensor is not in a place you can go in one hour anyway.
- idiotsecant 4y agoLots of sensors with a restricted pipe isn't uncommon - in the electrical transmission substation world they've been dealing with the problem of how to do a lot with a tiny amount of bandwidth for decades. An industrial fieldbus protocol even exists for it called DNP3. The answer is your end devices only signal on meaningful change, whatever that may be, and stay quiet the rest of the time. How meaningful that change must be depends on how much bandwidth you have. When you get right down to it you can do a lot with a little in the industrial controls and remote monitoring space. We get so used to overly verbose communications protocols and overly abstracted data structures and methods, it's refreshing once in a while to care about each bit!
- googlryas 4y agoYou 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-system 4y agoIt's for global IoT connectivity, just as it says. That is a very specific application.
- girvo 4y agoOur use case is industrial IoT sensing in extremely remote deployments.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NKosmatos 4y agoWhy 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.
- initplus 4y agoADS-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/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/
- Integer 4y agoADS-B is mandatory these days, and Aireon [1] has a constellation of satellite receivers for 24/7 global coverage. [1]https://aireon.com/ https://aireon.com/
- landemva 4y agoYet 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_03_09/article_07_1.html https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_...
- solarkraft 4y 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.
- differentview97 4y agoThis is not affiliated with SpaceX if I read the site correctly. Super-interesting though. Edit: Wrong, see below
- java-man 4y ago"View Open Positions" link points to SpaceX page https://www.spacex.com/careers/?search=swarm https://www.spacex.com/careers/?search=swarm
- xd1936 4y agoSpaceX purchased them last year. https://www.space.com/spacex-to-acquire-swarm-technologies-starlink-satellites https://www.space.com/spacex-to-acquire-swarm-technologies-s...
- kasperni 4y agoIt is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_Technologies
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notfish 4y agoSpaceX acquired swarm in 2021: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/08/09/spacex-acquiring-satellite-data-start-up-swarm-technologies.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/08/09/spa...
- kevmo314 4y agoI guess that explains why the marketing site looked so familiar.
- posguy 4y agoHasn't Helium shown that there is low demand for this type of IoT connectivity?
- pmorici 4y agoHelium isn’t truly world wide. Swarm is more like a direct competitor to Iridium Short Burst Data (SBD) service. Works anywhere on the globe. Helium relies on people nearby running a node so it only works where people live and have an internet connection.
- aaron695 4y agoIt's not even close to being global - https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/ Ignoring exactly how effective a crypto it has been or will be.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- byw 4y agoLooks like their documentation site is down. Any idea what kind of bandwidth we're talking about here?
- ttul 4y ago1 kbps
- gnarbarian 4y agoare you sure?
- stefan_ 4y agoAnd what latency. "Webhooks" and "REST API" isn't exactly screaming useful duplex communication channel.
- initplus 4y agoHigh. 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.
- jobigoud 4y agoRoughly 0.44 bits/s. Data is 750 packets of 192 bytes per month on the $5 plan.
- notfried 4y agoI 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 4y agoSo 50 messages for testing and calibration before they charge you? I wish all wireless providers were this nice.
- arriu 4y agoMinimum 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 4y agoWhat might somebody (or some company) use this for? 192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
- eterevsky 4y agoWeather station or any kind of remote sensor that you want to keep in some remote area.
- reaperducer 4y agoSilence sense and FCC-required logging for a mountaintop broadcast transmitter.
- dfc 4y agoWhat is "silence sense"?
- isomorphic 4y agoI'm speculating, but certain FCC licenses require you to transmit without significant gaps on your licensed frequencies or be fined. (The theory being that others could be making better use of your frequency since you aren't using it.) If your transmission gear goes down for whatever reason, you want to notify the FCC before others do. E.g., https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-slaps-birach-broadcasting-with-17-500-fine-for-unauthorized-silence/article_4cab3f9c-6871-11ec-93a9-8331c9e980cd.html https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-slaps-birach-broadcasti...
- 4y ago
- tspike 4y agoThis looks like a fantastic tool for ensuring the obsolescence of privacy.
- shswkna 4y agoThis product is not for attaching to people, but things that you actually want to be tracked.
- UncleEntity 4y 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.
- HideousKojima 4y agoCan 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.
- krm01 4y agoAny idea what the speeds are going to be, especially when compared to connecting IOT devices to a Cellular network?
- jcims 4y agoI 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 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.
- googlryas 4y agoYep, 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- delabay 4y agoHelium has a competitive Lora network at 100x less cost, in western Europe and US. Ducks
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoUnrelated to Bruce Sterling's Space Swarm https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Swarm.pdf https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Swarm.pdf
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y agoWell 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...!
- mmazing 4y agoNot likely with those data rates, for better or worse
- frenchie4111 4y agoData will get cheaper, fast
- citilife 4y agoYou'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 4y agoWhile that's true, I have a little bit of faith in Apple and Google. But how about the $18 humidifier I bought on Amazon?
- RockRobotRock 4y agoWhat data about you could they possibly make money off of, in less than a megabyte, that is worth more than the cost of putting the modules in?
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y agoThis 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.
- pnemonic 4y ago>SpaceX Ignored completely. Musk was cool until he opened his mouth all the way.
- panick21_ 4y agoMusk has literally been saying tons of stuff an talking a lot for 15 years.
- csmarshall 4y agoSo this is a division of spacex? Since that's where there "careers" page goes right.
- alsodumb 4y agoSpaceX acquired them last year.
- H1Supreme 4y agoWhat 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.
- jcims 4y agoLooks 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.
- googlryas 4y agoYou get a REST API to to query to get your data. Eg GET api.swarm.space/devices/$id/recent
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoYou dont buy a sattelite terminal yourself , they company has their own terminal and will make it avaliable to you over an API
- initplus 4y agoDownlink is internal to the sat provider, and will just send messages on to you over the ordinary internet.
- ec109685 4y agoSurprised dedicated ultra low bandwidth satellites are the way to go when developing a service like this versus piggybacking on something like StarLink.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoIt is SpaceX also, so presumably in some regard piggybacks on StarLink.
- girvo 4y agoNo. It was purchased by SpaceX last year, but uses their own hardware.
- panick21_ 4y agoThey will defiantly unify this stuff more over time.
- girvo 4y agoDefinitely, it’s on the roadmap I believe, but today they haven’t. We use Swarm in production for some of our remote industrial IoT deployments
- jjtheblunt 4y agoNo? SpaceX purchased it, so it's theirs now. They may for instance be using shared ground network hardware and software post acquisition. Do you have reason to think otherwise?
- girvo 4y agoI can’t talk about some stuff unfortunately, we’re partnered with them, but they’re not using any of that yet as far as we have been told. We’re eagerly waiting for them to, as it should increase what we can do with their product!
- 4y ago
- peterweyand 4y agoUltimately 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 4y agoYou can purchase a single breakout board from Sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19236 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/19236
- mirashii 4y agoHuh, 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-goals/ https://spacenews.com/swarm-ceo-talks-past-mistakes-future-g...
- elxx 4y agoSame, 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-fines-swarm-900000-for-unauthorized-satellite-launch-idUSKCN1OJ2WT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-satellite-fine/fcc-fi...
- qchris 4y agoIt 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 4y agoWouldn’t ham radio works ? I thought by now those would be miniature enough to be used for IOT ?
- tlrobinson 4y agoTwo 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoHave 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).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- StanAngeloff 4y agoThis 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/ https://hiber.global/hiberhilo/
- kavalg 4y agoI 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 4y agoWhy would you need a satellite connection in an urban environment?
- kavalg 4y agoThere 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 4y agoWhat 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?