Satellite communications are increasingly being seen as a viable alternative or complement to terrestrial infrastructure – providing connectivity where cellular or Wi-Fi fails – as the market continues to grow, buoyed by the launch of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites and communications modules. Ian Itz, Executive Director of IoT at Iridium Communications was well-placed to share insights into this exciting market with IoT Insider.
Iridium Communications looks at IoT in two categories: personal communications for safety of life applications, and industrial IoT. They produce NB-IoT modules for worldwide use, with a focus on making smaller devices for challenging environments.
“Rather than providing [our customers] with a terminal or something that’s fully developed, we give them the building blocks,” Itz explained. “We give them a module, the technical support to be able to develop products, and we pair them up with antenna manufacturers or other component providers to close out their solution.”
There are several applications where satellite is “the only option,” Itz said, to mirror the earlier point made about how satellite is being regarded as increasingly useful for providing connectivity to applications that previously would not have had access to it, or would have struggled with it.
“In terms of customers I have … they might introduce satellite from that perspective, but it’s about whether the device is going to be operating,” said Itz, “and so that drives whether or not it’s going to be a dual mode device or a dedicated satellite device. Without digging deep into the numbers a good 30% of our business is devices that are doing dual mode applications.
“Either they’re full time on cellular and they’re backing up to satellite every once in a while, or they’re mobile devices that are bouncing in and out.”
One example is in Brazil, where Iridium supports telematics applications, monitoring vehicles that have no problem remaining connected when driving around in urban environments, but are relying on satellite connectivity once out of these cities.
“Telematics is a very big application,” said Itz. “Construction companies like Caterpillar and Komatsu and HItachi are some of our bigger customers or end users at that level. They’re always operating in locations that are new and being developed. We do a lot of work in maritime and fisheries, ensuring that fishermen are staying within geographical bounds.”
Other applications include aviation, agriculture and utilities, the latter two of which are the largest for Iridium.
Integrating AI into satellite communications
The emergence of artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) in satellite communications may be relatively new, but the potential benefits include looking at the network level, said Itz, and looking at the module level.
At the network level, Itz explained that their core business in providing critical satellite communications for natural disasters, for example, where terrestrial infrastructure can fail means they can dynamically shift network load to provide more bandwidth.
“But as AI starts to be rolled out into different networks we could see the onset of AI shifting the network loads automatically without any kind of human interaction,” he said.
On the module level, “devices could potentially do a lot more of Edge processing and computational stuff, and optimise the data so you’re only sending the smaller, critical pieces of data over the satellite link,” Itz added. “It not only optimises the fact that the data will get out because it’s a smaller packet, but it also results in spending less money … if we can provide that in our modules and give our customers the ability to control things like temperature fluctuations, power optimisation on the device, all of those things could be built in so modules are smarter at the edge.”
AI could also be used to identify usage behaviour and network anomalies, as well as spot indicators of jamming.
“Those aren’t things that we have necessarily implemented, but what we think about [with] integrating AI into our devices and how that might benefit us.”
On that same note, Itz said that before they integrate AI into their business security has to be seriously considered, and has to be integrated where it makes sense – although he has already witnessed partners of theirs implementing AI for tasks such as weather monitoring or predictive analysis within agriculture.
Iridium’s latest module
Iridium’s most recently launched module, the Certus 9704, was launched in November 2024. It can be integrated with Arduino and Adafruit, a feature that Itz said they hadn’t done in the past and represents a shift to making it easy for developers to integrate their products.
“Typically, we’ve had a very closed off development environment … It’s more open-source in the fact that it is built for the developer. It has libraries accessible through GitHub, so it’s more of a developer-friendly environment … to get people started so they don’t have to recreate the wheel.”
Notably, within the Arduino and Adafruit communities there are applications running AI environments, meaning Iridium’s partners can natively integrate them “off the shelf”.
“We wanted to create a kit that anybody could buy, whether it’s a developer in college working on a prototype for a project, or somebody at a company who wants to develop a satellite solution,” summarised Itz.
Looking ahead, Itz said what excited him about the satellite market was “the moving parts” and how “dynamic” it is.
“I’ve been here at Iridium for over 10 years and I’ve got to see the company grow from the original constellation to sunsetting that one and putting the new one up, and then working with our partners. For me, it’s about the variation in terms of what we do and dealing with all the different types of partners we have. That’s the joy of it.”
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