Minimum 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
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
144,000 bytes. Almost the capacity as a Commodore 1541 disk drive.
40 years ago it would have been unfathomable that a regular schmoe could transmit a floppy disk via satellite for just $5.
Also, not sure where to find a decent Commodore system these days to utilize this plan :)
A quick example, you have a sensor that sends a single metric every minute. Suppose that you can pack that info (sensor id, metric type and data) in 32 bytes. You're looking at about 1.2MB/month of data (8 times your 144K), which will come to about $40/month.
Quite expensive for a single data point, but I can imagine several use cases where that cost can be easily justified.
But I get your point, also you can always do a lot of things to save on bandwidth, like do not send info which is not interesting (i.e. no point in sending 100s of "no fire was detected" messages).
Btw, anyone here knows if there's compression schemes designed specifically for small data packets? Gzip and others would be overkill as headers vastly exceed payload size. Just using raw LZ77 may work but it's 2022 so there's probably a specific thing for that already.
Also, what about data that follows a specific format, like only integer numbers, it would be nice to have an algorithm that takes a "string" of 32-bit ints and gives you back a binary buffer with a smaller lossless representation of it.
Something like msgpack might be able to compress ints to some degree since it can represent them as smaller data types.
Not sure there is any automatic solution for compression here. If you know your own use case you are in the best position to choose where to sacrifice accuracy with a lossy compression scheme. But this relies on understanding of the accuracy of the input data, possible ranges of values, importance of accuracy in different fields etc. Not sure how an automated algorithm could take these real world constraints into account.
A clever compression algo can't help you if you try compress 4 doubles, but in reality you only needed byte precision on some fixed 0-100% range.
Zstd dictionary mode? At small sizes using a dictionary is generally the way to go.
I suppose you haven't worked with such constraints before, so that's why you think this needs 32 bytes. In reality, 4 or 6 will likely do.
Send diff in metric value if applicable, use variable-length encoding to not waste bytes. Allocate bits and not whole ints to things (like metric type). ID is already part of lower level protocol - the address, so you do not need it
Because we need to put nearly arbritrary data into our NB-IoT UDP socket, Inmarsat or Swarm, saving bytes let’s us pack more data into a message so we can send fewer messages: saving money and increasing reliability (because if you miss a Swarm upload time you can have hours before the next one, for example, or our Simcom modem might hit a black spot and such)
You get terminal identification from the carrier, no need to waste precious packet space on identifiers. And it's probably also a waste to encode field names into your packet - just record fields at the same offset every time. If 16 bits of precision is enough for you (it likely is) you can squeeze 16 metrics (or 16 time series recordings of the same metric) into every packet.
But it's associated with crypto so people hate it.
It also undercuts everything by a factor of 100x and is ubiquitous in US and western Europe.
PS: Saying LORA is "ubiquitous" in the US oversells it quite a bit. It is quite available in cities but most rural areas are completely devoid of coverage, see [2].
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/critique-on-helium-s-6-5k-mon...
[2] https://scwcontent.affino.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/031/Sen...
* you can buy helium hotspots for $100 now, on par with other lora gateways
* " vast majority of the income of the project" is vague and incorrect. The hotspot OEMs (of which there are 50+) receive sales revenue, not "the project".
* You're referencing a Senet chart, which is actually a roaming partner on Helium. This isn't actually a helium coverage map.
I will correct myself on the coverage, about 98% of Americans are covered, not 98% of land in America. Oops. America is a big place.
https://www.inmarsat.com/en/solutions-services/enterprise/se...
But we’re using IDP as it’s not really out yet. Next year hopefully!
192 bytes * 750 packets = 144000 bytes per month at what speed/latency?
https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-slaps-birach-broadcasti...
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.
They were anticipating some legislation that would require full auditability of supply chain.
Hopefully some resellers pop up that let you buy them onesie-twosie to tinker with.
In the normal case, you send a heartbeat once per (interval calibrated to threat model). Should be plenty of packets left to encode "send lawyers, guns and money" when necessary.
I bet the military/intelligence community has all sorts of ideas!
eg https://marketplace.att.com/products/att-iot-dataplans-lte-n...
disclaimer: I work with In-Q-Tel investments almost daily, but am not affiliated.
Do you see any interesting trends? In terms of one layer deeper than the general trends such as AI, space, etc.
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 redundant txt messages.
2 way communications aren't much more demanding because most of what you need can be done with lookup tables, and there aren't that many different commands you would need to send to an asset tag for local scanning. If you want to do person-to-person, 2 bytes per word is sufficient for a fairly large vocabulary (especially a tightly specified one like military brevity codes) - not exactly chatty but sufficient for many operational/emergency purposes.
The $60/yr plan allows for 750 _messages_ per month. Up to 3000 messages per month if you stack 4 plans together.
So on the base plan, you're limited to ~1 message per hour if you spread it out across the month.
How so? 6 messages per day is one message per 4 hours.
Err, no - at 750 packets/month, you’d burn through your allocation in 12.5 hours at that rate.
Their suggested architecture was basically to use this for notifications for very remote sensors: "battery below 20%. Come help" etc
The other way is for things like Garmin InReach: "Send message 1" (which is "I'm ok and don't need help") etc.
I wonder how much total bandwidth each of these satellites can push per month. Anyone know the backend aggregate sustained data rate per sat?
Could always do a groupgets anyway.