Beyond Connectivity

A: In terms of the actual verticals, just coming out of Taiwan, for example, I saw quite a few drone OEMs that were touting critical comms connectivity or PNT. I see drones as one of the higher-volume type of use cases where NTN IoT actually makes sense, because drones are one of those verticals where they move in and out of cellular coverage more frequently than, say, other devices.

When you look at NTN IoT that’s on the market right now, a lot of it’s in GEO through Skylo, and basically that’s one of the considerations that you need to have. You’re going to need to be not so worried about latency. You’re going to need to use devices that connect over the frequencies that are required to work on GEO.

Some operators adopting the standard say they are doing so because they have a core of customers within aviation and some other segments that operate across cellular and satellite network coverage. Their customers began asking about having a solution that could flip between both types of connectivity. Demand was high enough that the operator decided that adopting the NTN standard made commercial and long-term business sense to them.

We’re seeing that across quite a few verticals. Aviation is one of those, and agriculture and maritime among other areas. There’s an argument being made that if using the standard, you can’t really get high-quality, performance connections as opposed to having a proprietary solution. So, some still view that there’s a limitation on where you can actually use the IoT NTN standard. But we’re still seeing demand and deployment across a few different verticals.

A: There’s a perception that a lot of the current silicon that’s out on the market for IoT NTN is essentially catered to GEO—for Skylo and a lot of GEO solutions. That’s what’s been on the market, so naturally the silicon vendors will pump what they can sell and connect. But telcos and other potential users of IoT NTN are concerned about the viability of the business beyond GEO and if there will be a market for LEO as well.

There’s a perception that the ecosystem of silicon, hardware, and different modules isn’t quite adapted yet for LEO. There’s a concern around the adaptation of the hardware for Doppler—since the speed at which LEO satellites move makes connecting to the hardware more difficult. So, there are some concerns the current hardware is only good for GEO links and therefore an IoT NTN standard play today limits versatility, versus just going with the proprietary solutions which can be in LEO or GEO.

A lot of enterprises just aren’t sure yet who the winners and losers are going to be in satellite. They want to make sure they have a partner that isn’t going to go bust in two years and is still going to exist. I think that’s actually the bigger sell here. In a sense the protocol to them is more of a byproduct of who they’re partnering with. It’s part of the reason for a partnership, but it’s not the sole reason.

A: We can all speculate on a lot of the plays that have happened throughout the industry. There’s been a lot of movements that have happened with AST, SpaceX, Omnispace, SES, Lynk. There’s quite a bit of movement that’s occurred that points to MSS spectrum being critical for IoT and for direct-to-device applications. And it supports the argument that these operators would be moving towards a standard. They haven’t come out and declared that they’re going to be using the 3GPP standard, but there’s increasing likelihood that they will. They would be leaving billions on the table if they didn’t. It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. If you have the network and spectrum required to do the standard, then you would want to tap into that ecosystem and connect as many devices as possible.