How satellite connectivity is bringing global IoT into the mainstream

In this episode of the Trending Tech podcast, host Jim Morrish, co-founder of Transforma Insights is joined by Tim Last, executive vice president at Iridium, to explore how satellite connectivity is evolving from a specialist solution for remote applications into an integrated part of mainstream IoT.

They discuss how lower-cost hardware, cellular standards and Iridium NTN Direct are helping developers combine terrestrial and satellite connectivity within a single solution. From asset tracking and connected vehicles to autonomous aircraft, ships and industrial machines, discover how standards-based satellite IoT can provide reliable coverage when devices move beyond cellular networks.

Jim and Tim also examine the growing threat of GNSS jamming and spoofing, the importance of trusted positioning, navigation and timing and why resilient global connectivity will be critical to the future of autonomous systems.

Plus, in “What the Tech?”, find out how scientists are turning sharks into roaming sensor platforms to collect ocean data and improve hurricane forecasting.

Transcript

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Jim Morrish: Hi, and welcome to this Trending Tech podcast, focusing on satellite connectivity for IoT. So today satellite connectivity is moving from being a specialist solution for the most remote applications, and increasingly it's becoming more of a integrated part of mainstream IoT. The market's changing rapidly and new low power satellite services, greater use of industry standards and closer integration with cellular networks and making satellite connectivity, you know, much more accessible to IoT developers.

Result is a future where satellite may increasingly complement terrestrial connectivity, providing IoT devices with, you know, ubiquitous coverage, without requiring developers to design completely separate solutions. So in this episode of Trending Tech, we'll focus on some of the things that are happening under the hood as it so to speak, to enable this transition and some of the emerging challenges.

So my name's Jim Morrish. I'm a co-founder of Transformer Insights, a firm of industry analysts focused on all things related to digital [00:01:00] transformation. And for this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by Tim Last, Executive Vice President with Iridium. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Last: Hi, Jim good to be here.

Jim Morrish: Great. Thank you. It's great to have you as a guest.

But I mean, as regular listeners to this podcast series will know, we always introduce some news stories as part of the podcast. In the beginning of this podcast, we'll have a serious news story, and then in the end we'll have something a little more lighthearted in a 'What the Tech' news story section at the end.

So for the interesting serious news story that I spotted this week, I noticed that the FCC is exploring whether unlicensed devices could connect directly to satellites. And, you know, potentially opening more than 200 megahertz of spectrum. The details are a bit sparse, but, you know, Wi-Fi and IoT are within the scope described by the FCC, and the move could extend satellite connectivity to billions of existing devices. But it does raise questions around power interference and spectrum sharing. But what strikes me here is just how quickly satellite communications are changing right now. So [00:02:00] with the advent of non-terrestrial networks and standards from the cellular world and so tight integration between terrestrial and non-terrestrial options for cellular devices, you know, we're seeing a massive reduction in the barriers to entry for using satellite connectivity, and this adds another dimension by extending satellite services to licence exempt devices. And these licence exempt solutions have been demonstrated to be able to find a relevant niche. And indeed, you know, LoRaWAN and et cetera, those standards do already support communication via satellites.

So from my perspective, this highlights just how quickly the options for satellite connectivity are evolving right now. It's been back 10 years and satellite was a pretty niche endeavour. Now we have easy access to satellite broadband, emerging near seamless integration between terrestrial and cellular networks and non-terrestrial connectivity. And also now, licence exempt options, enabling businesses to connect those, you know, billions of simple remote sensors. So it's a huge period of change in the market, really. Did you spot that story? Did you have any thoughts on it, [00:03:00] Tim?

Tim Last: Yeah, absolutely Jim. I mean, you're right, the evolution of technology on the one hand, things like standards that have been driving the satellite and cellular world closer together are also now being combined with the ease of getting things into space. That's really the other thing that has been happening to drive this kind of technical and potential business change.

Unlicensed spectrum obviously is, you know, commonly used on earth for all sorts of applications. Everything from your old in-home wireless phone to now wide area IoT networks. But the challenges of making that connection to space weren't always easy to resolve, both technically as well as just frankly the capital required to try things out, launching, you know, rockets and satellites. It wasn't the kind of thing that you could really prototype easily, test out easily, resolve the issues, and then launch a business with. All of that is changing now. It won't be lost on you and your viewers that launching rockets is becoming pretty commonplace. Um, you know, every [00:04:00] week you are seeing launches, not just in the government space, which has always been a heavy user of satellites, but from a variety of commercial applications, you know, communications, IoT services, Earth observation and the challenges of unlicensed spectrum though remain in space as they do on the ground. I mean, you mentioned things like interference that actually gets pretty complicated when your satellite is actually looking at or being able to receive a much wider area of devices or traffic on the ground. It's one thing to sort out the interference when your antenna is looking a couple of kilometres in your local area. It's another thing if you're seeing, you know, 3, 4, 500 kilometres on the Earth from a position in space. So there are challenges still to be resolved, but I think we're beginning to see some of that broken down and we're seeing capital deployed.

One of the companies that you probably should go look at, Hubble Networks. This is a company that got formed in the [00:05:00] US here a few years ago and they've been testing Bluetooth in space. Something that probably 10 years ago people would've said, " that sounds crazy. How on earth is that gonna even be possible? Feasible?" But having done some long range tests on Earth, they've now started to launch a satellite constellation.

And it's the classic use of unlicensed spectrum. If you can make a cheap Bluetooth sensor tag device able to be seen from space, I think it opens all sorts of opportunities in that area. But yeah, a bunch of technical challenges still have to be solved to make it a reliable service.

Jim Morrish: Absolutely. But a quite remarkable, you know, confluence of enablers just coming together at this point in time, as you mentioned, the payload cost per kilo is just falling so rapidly, and also some of the technological advances and advances in AI and actually peeling this signal out of all of the noise. It is just evolving so quickly. So it's an extremely exciting space.

With that, let's get stuck into the discussion 'cause we had to talk more about satellites. Now you are with Iridium. [00:06:00] So for listeners who might be new to Iridium, can you just provide a little background again, what Iridium does? The industries you still have today?

Tim Last: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for those that don't know, we're a global satellite communications company. We're here talking about space and satellites. Iridium was one of the first companies to enter the commercial satellite market something like 25 years ago. We have today the only fully global, low-earth orbit network that operates over 100% of the globe using L-band Spectrum.

Again, if you're not technical, L-band is an area of the radio frequency band pretty close to GPS. It is one of the bands. The reason it's used for GPS is that it's an ideal band for communication between earth and space. It's very resilient, very reliable. You can operate devices with low power, and all of those things have been used by Iridium to really create our business today. When Iridium was launched 25 years ago, it was essentially [00:07:00] one of the first satellite phone companies in the days when satellite phones were the only way to communicate beyond terrestrial coverage. Today, we're much more of an IoT company. We've managed to adapt our network and also grow our customer base to create a myriad of different proprietary IoT solutions that use Iridium's network.

So today we're a global operator. You know, think of us like you would a sort of AT&T or a Vodafone. We run our own network, we own our own satellites. We have Spectrum which is allocated or licenced to us globally around the world, and then we provide services, both to enterprise customers, governments, as well as in some cases consumers.

That's Iridium's business.

Jim Morrish: Fantastic. Thank you. And in the introduction to this podcast, we discussed some of the enablers and how quickly the environment is changing and then the standards and the cost falling, et cetera. And how traditionally satellite connectivity has been seen as, you know, quite expensive, changing rapidly. But what specifically is [00:08:00] Iridium's role in changing that and democratising that for IoT developers?

Tim Last: Yeah, sure. I'll talk first about our sort of current approach to the market and I think we'll probably come on and talk a little bit about what standards and the changing evolution in satellite and terrestrial is going to lead to.

We built our IoT business and expanded our IoT business across the full gamut of existing satellite enabled IoT markets.

But as you sort of previewed in that intro, it's been somewhat limited because of proprietary technology. Every satellite company up until a couple of years ago, developed their services, their network, using essentially different kinds of standards and different kinds of proprietary technological approaches. Geostationary satellites, medium-earth orbit, low-earth orbit, different bands, different spectrum. And what that tended to lead to was a smaller scale and as a consequence, higher costs, what as many of [00:09:00] your viewers will know, if you're in the IoT business, that's really the enemy for IoT deployments.

IoT deployments rely on low cost, being able to adapt and integrate into whatever the application is and meet the use case for that IoT solution. Iridium's approach is really to not provide a one size fits all product. We realised pretty early on that being successful in IoT would mean that we would have to meet our customers in a variety of different ways in order to allow them to integrate our communications technology into the application or service they're offering. And what I mean by that is we don't just build sort of finished products or a single product for a customer to use. Maybe use the example of somebody like Starlink who produces essentially a single dish device for a customer to plug into. We create a variety of ways that IoT applications can take advantage of our network. It could be a finished product, it could be an embedded [00:10:00] modem, which third party manufacturers then put into their devices.

We've also extended that in the last five or eight years to chip sets and asics. We've driven down the cost of embedding Iridium into smaller, lower cost, you know, smaller form factor devices so the customers can really pick and choose where they want to integrate. And that really allows us to then meet a variety of different use cases. You know, if somebody wants to really drive all the cost out, spend more NRE up front developing a product, they can take an ASIC from us. They could even take software from us. We don't even have to have a customer buy hardware from us to develop an application.

The other thing I'd say we focused on is we focused on the process and how we support those customers. Every IoT application is a series of steps to get a customer into the market, to get a product developed, and we recognise that, particularly if you're working with satellite for the first time, you need guidance, [00:11:00] handholding, tools, education. The more of that you get and the easier that process becomes, the faster you are gonna get to market with your application. You know, a simplified certification process. If you put too many barriers, too much cost in the way of customers, you'll find that that slows down their development and creates more headaches for them.

The last thing I'd say is we've continued to innovate our products and services. We haven't just sort of, you know, launched an IoT service and then sat back and hoped that that would meet all of the customer needs. One recent example, we launched a device called the 9604 recently. The name doesn't really mean anything, but it was the first multi-mode device that Iridium launched into the market. By multi-mode, I mean, we combined Iridium with cellular LTE and with a multi-GNSS chip so that a customer could essentially buy a device that could meet a variety of use case, but in a single package, a single skew. Now, by doing that, we managed to eliminate about 60% of the cost that any of our [00:12:00] customers would traditionally have to accept if they were combining these things, separate chips, separate integrations on a board. All of that is a headache and it's puts latency into the process of developing an IoT application.

One more example and then I'll hand it back to you. We also launched recently our new PNT ASIC, PNT positioning, navigation timing. It's an IoT like service that Iridium offers to provide resilient location using our network.

Think of it as like GPS if the GPS network didn't exist. We launched an ASIC, which meant we invested millions of dollars to really cost reduce that into a chip so that customers didn't have to purchase higher cost devices, and that means that they can now put that capability in a huge variety of different applications. So improving the process, reducing the cost, and making it easy for customers to adapt for their specific IoT application is really where we focused a lot of our energy and effort.

Jim Morrish: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, certainly given that, again, the [00:13:00] diversity of IoT markets and also the just diverging scale of different requirements. Some with a very small scale deployments of, you know, a handful of devices, some with multiple million devices. Yeah. Just those scale economics dictates that different people again, or different end users, again, to want to buy different capabilities. For some, it's, it's about buying essentially a finished product and then customising it. Some of them will want to get right down to the metal and just build it up as much of it themselves as they can. So I certainly think that's the right approach.

There's one specific thing which I think Iridium is moving forwards at the moment. I think there's an NTN Direct solution, which I think is heading towards commercial service. So what does that specifically unlock for developers that wasn't possible before?

Tim Last: Yeah, sure. So what I was talking about in describing our go to market for IoT has been the way that Iridium has operated for the last sort of 20 years serving IoT markets. That's been using proprietary solutions. You know, iridium specific, think of it as that way. [00:14:00] The market for proprietary IoT solutions globally around the world, not just for us, but for every satellite company that's been in this business is maybe five or 8 million units, and that's pretty small compared to the massive IoT market. As you'll know, the global market is in the billions of devices, you know, whether you're talking unlicensed, cellular spectrum, satellite spectrum. So what's been preventing that? Well, it's really about cost. It's about cost and costage driven by scale. If you think of it in things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and then cellular IoT solutions, those IoT solutions have all been built on the back of large scale networks that were fundamentally built for other things. You know, cellular networks were built for people, Wi-Fi networks built for home networking. That scale has allowed the cost of both delivering the network and delivering a device really down into a low cost point, which has enabled IoT [00:15:00] solutions to flourish using that technology. But the same thing hasn't really happened in the satellite world. So NTN Direct is a network offering that Iridium is launching this year whereby we've actually adopted cellular based standards to build an IoT solution, but using our satellite network. What do I mean by that? Well, in the cellular marketplace, 3GPP defines the standards for all cellular operators, including the IoT standards. We've adopted a 3GPP standard. It's in release 19, which is the currently ratified release of 3GPP and it means that any operator, any cellular operator, as well as anybody that's developing a IoT solution, can build to a known standard, and what that means for Iridium is it means that we get to take advantage of the scale that much of the cellular industry has managed to build. Device costs come down, applications become easier to develop and deliver on Iridium's network because we're using the same [00:16:00] technology that they're using on the cellular network. You'll be able to buy a chip set from industry standard companies that are well known in the cellular industry, and that chip set will work on Iridium's network. As chip sets get delivered, it will go into modems, it will go into finished product devices. Off the shelf tracking devices that are cellular only today will be available with Iridium sort of along for the ride, if you like, because the technology will operate seamlessly.

We're also working in partnership with some of the world's largest cellular carriers who deliver terrestrial IoT. This was one of our ambitions when we decided to take on this technical development. We've announced relationships with companies like Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom and China Mobile. These are some of the largest IoT operating companies in the world, and what that means is that the customers who deploy millions of devices using their terrestrial technology will be able to add satellite as simply as roaming onto another terrestrial network. In fact, the [00:17:00] relationship that we have with many of these companies is essentially a roaming relationship. So we look like just, you know, you would on any other cellular network that device, when the terrestrial network ceases to exist because the coverage is gone, or you've breached the edge of the network, Iridium's network can take over. So that's really one of the biggest developments that Iridium is invested in over the last couple of years. We go to early access this year in the next month or so for customers, and it'll be launched globally round about the second quarter of next year.

Jim Morrish: Yeah, certainly. I hear comments about the scale of opportunity that that unlocks and how actors suddenly accelerates away from what's been characterised as a proprietary satellite market. So I mean, really, I think there seem to be three opportunity types in there for non-terrestrial networking type solutions.

One is a direct substitute for those old proprietary technologies. Um, there's another one where satellite connectivity is essential for a device, but they can leverage the higher bandwidth connectivity if they happen to be in urban areas or [00:18:00] areas of good cellular coverage, and there's opportunities there to combine, you know, a thin, lower bandwidth satellite connectivity when devices around in the field and then when they come near a warehouse or an urban area, much higher speed, you know, connectivity. And then there's the flip side of that, which are devices which you'd expect basically to be in urban areas most of the time, but might stray outside of those areas, and that, I think that last category, they probably won't use satellite an awful lots or a great proportion of the time, but, you know, satellite has potential to add value to an enormous amount of connections, and we think it could be around one and a half billion connections. You have things like cars that just happen to drift into a not sport

Tim Last: Yeah, I mean you've covered the sort of different scenarios well. I mean, all of those examples are things that Iridium actually does have solutions and customers that provide sort of, you know, value added solutions in today. But the key difference by introducing a standards based technology is really the cost at which you can adopt that [00:19:00] technology and the scale which you then get access to.

We have lots of high value customers that track high value assets. We have government customers who critical connectivity is an absolute must have, but for most regular businesses, small, medium enterprise, and even consumers it really does need to be a marginal cost for them to accept. Yeah, I'm happy to have satellite as part of my solution, but I'm not prepared to pay twice or three times the price for the privilege to do that, and that's what standards-based technology and the satellite industry is gonna do over the next several years.

Jim Morrish: Yeah. Okay. No, great. So very significant opportunity there. Let's change pace slightly and look at one of the, I guess, emerging challenge in this space, particularly relating to things that are GNS or geo-positioning dependent because, you know, there's increasing concern about jamming and spoofing and some of the impact that could have on ability to get an accurate location when one is needed. So what should IoT manufacturers be doing differently to make solutions more [00:20:00] resilient?

Tim Last: Well, this is something that Iridium recognised probably 15 or 16 years ago. You know, GNSS, GPS and the associated networks like Baidu and Galileo have become part of the infrastructure fabric of the world, and it's not just that blue dot on a map that most people are used to when they're trying to, navigate their way to the supermarket or to work and what have you.

GNSS and GPS underpins so much of our critical infrastructure around the world. A lot of people don't know that things like energy grids and telecom networks are fundamentally dependent on reliable timing and synchronisation. A lot of which comes from GPS or GNSS systems. A lot of global trade relies on it, of course, often for things like safe navigation of airlines and, safe transition of goods on the ocean.

So when GNSS systems get jammed, spoofed, denied or just plain fail, I mean, you know, it's not always [00:21:00] nefarious or in the middle of a war zone. It can create huge problems across a wide range of industries and for much of the world. One example I'll give you, you might have seen this in the news in the last couple of months, but Telstra in Australia had a pretty significant network outage. It was headline news in Australia, about 45% of their customer base was down hard for quite a long period of time. What a lot of people don't know is that the piece of equipment that failed in their network was actually a GNSS piece of equipment. It was a timing and synchronisation piece of equipment.

$25,000 worth of equipment cost the Australian economy an estimated three or $400 million of losses because networks were down, customers couldn't get on with their business, people couldn't navigate. All sorts of different issues came up as a result of that. So the economic costs of not having reliable GNSS are starting to be realised. They're starting to become more well known, and what that means is there is a desire seeking [00:22:00] alternative solutions. How do I make my service more resilient? How do I make sure that I really always have that critical capability?

Another quick example. Every 5G cell site in the world, a lot of people are familiar with what 5G Cell service delivers whether you're a consumer or an IoT customer, every 5G cell site got GPS as part of it, okay? What happens if you GPS becomes unavailable? What happens if you're jammed? What happens if that service becomes unreliable? Guess what? Your comms network comes down just like it did in Telstra in Australia.

So we recognise this about 15 years ago, we actually built an alternative GPS like timing and location service on our network. Iridium's network has got a couple of unique characteristics. The first one is because we're low-earth orbit, we're a lot closer to the planet. Most GPS networks are sort of 20,000 miles away. The satellite that is delivering that signal to your car is actually a very quiet, low power signal. That's why when you drive into your garage, maybe you lose GPS [00:23:00] and why, you know, if you take your phone in your office, perhaps the GPS doesn't operate. Iridium's network is closer and delivers a high power signal that can work inside buildings. So that's one advantage. It helps make the service more reliable, resilient, and it also can help when system other systems are being jammed.

The other thing we put into our service is, we made it resilient by putting some very special cryptographic, sort of technical foundation in there, which means spoofing becomes a lot harder, almost impossible to do with Iridium's network.

Spoofing for those on your podcast that don't know is where a nefarious actor interferes with GPS. They don't jam it and block it, but they make it appear as if you are somewhere else. So they inject another signal that makes you think that actually, you know, instead of being at home, you are 10 miles down the road or instead of the aircraft being in a safe flight path, maybe it's actually over a dangerous territory.

So having a global [00:24:00] satellite delivered high power system that can withstand both of those things, we believe is very powerful, and it's a service that we've been offering in the market for the last couple of years, and it's beginning to take on importance not only with government customers, but with a lot of commercial customers.

Jim Morrish: Yes, there's certainly a lot, or what seems a surprising amount in our day-to-day lives, which does end up being reliant on those extremely accurate time signals, and I might like to think that actually, that dependency is reducing, but in fact, I think it's increasing.

As increasingly renewable energy sources are plugged into the grid, they need to be coordinated in a different way, and very accurate time synchronisation across those distributed energy generating assets becomes really important, and obviously, you know, power grids are critical to our economies. It may have cost a lot for Telstra to go down, but if the power network went down at the same time, I suspect the consequences would've been even worse.

Tim Last: And I think that there's two aspects I'd like your listeners to really think about when they think about GNSS or GPS. One is just availability, [00:25:00] reliability. Do I have a signal? Do I not have a signal? That's obviously, you know, people can see the obvious problem if the signal becomes unavailable. But the other important aspect is really trust. So much of our world today is relying on communication services or signals provided by networks or cloud services, and it's really important that both people, individual users, enterprises, business as well as IoT applications can trust what they're receiving. So a trusted signal is just as important as having a signal at all. I mean, if a signal is not available, you can pretty easily tell that I'm in a contested environment, or I'm in a dangerous place. It's easy to take evasive action or to do something different, but if your signal has been spoofed and you don't know it's been spoofed, that's even more dangerous. That means you're operating on a level of trust that is just, you know, it's a foundation that's wrong, and that we believe is, is a really important thing for people to be able to [00:26:00] mitigate.

Jim Morrish: Okay. Thank you. And we're coming towards the end of the podcast running outta time a little, but let's just look to the future a little, and see where all this might go. So one of the amazing things about IoT is just those slightly odd things that keep popping up. Um, all sorts of interesting use cases.

So what kind of applications and industries do you think are gonna most likely to surprise us with their adoption of satellite connectivity?

Tim Last: Yeah, so you'd already mentioned one earlier. Automotive. I think the opportunity for satellite to penetrate automotive applications is pretty big. Obviously, you know, cars go all over the globe. They often operate where coverage is either unreliable or in some cases non-existent. Obviously, you know, people that just live in urban environments may not often see communication problems, but you don't have to go very far outside of cities to find that the communication becomes unreliable. Lowering the cost of an IoT solution to enable satellite to take over will fundamentally change I [00:27:00] think the penetration of satellite into the automotive market. Iridium's network is narrowband in nature, but even narrowband networks will be able to offer valuable solutions, and I'll give you a few examples. You know, emergency messaging, an S.O.S in the case of an accident. If you're off the grid and if you don't have an ability to grab your cell phone or to make a call, the car automatically doing that for you. Automatic crash notifications, which are already being standardised in many vehicles, that's something which gets even more value when you know that you can do over a 100% of the globe. Stolen vehicle tracking, fleet management for businesses, vehicle diagnostics and predictive maintenance. These are all things that could be enabled over the type of network capability that Iridium and other satellite networks have, and extending that globally is what all of the global automotive industry want. They don't want any restrictions geographically as to where they can sell their products and how they can provide services. So I [00:28:00] think that's one big opportunity.

The other one I'll quickly describe is what I'd call the wider market of autonomy. What do I mean by autonomy? Well, all sorts of things today are getting autonomous capabilities built into them. Some of them you can see and might be obvious, you know, an autonomous delivery vehicle or tractor, but in the future, you are gonna see things like aircraft flying themselves without crews, or perhaps with a reduced crew. You are gonna see drones operating beyond visual line of sight. You're gonna see ships on the ocean navigating with fewer people or even no people on board. We already see this in things like mining and agriculture, where we're starting to see autonomous vehicles. Now, although a lot of the intelligence resides on the vehicle itself, you know, AI and localised systems have enabled a lot of that. Every autonomous vehicle needs to answer some fundamental questions. Where am I? Where am I going? What's happening? And can I communicate and respond or be commanded if something goes wrong? And that [00:29:00] means that you need a new type of infrastructure to serve the world of autonomy. You need a reliable, global, trusted backbone that can serve the autonomy market, and we believe that Iridium can be part of that because of our global IoT and our global PNT capabilities. So those are probably the two that I'd say stand out for me.

Jim Morrish: Okay. Fantastic. Thank you. I mean, it's been a really interesting discussion, but what seems to have come out of it to me is just how the scale curve is changing and the impacts of scale that's changing. We're just talking orders of magnitude, greater scale, firstly in terms of devices that connect to satellite, but then in terms of, you know, NTN adoption and the alignment between cellular and satellite standards with satellite connectivity, effectively leveraging the scale of the cellular markets, there's just orders of magnitude more scale coming in, which is reducing the costs, increasing flexibility and just making it easier for developers to build those combined applications which work in remote areas supported by satellite and in [00:30:00] urban areas supported by cellular.

So again, a very interesting time.

Tim Last: I do wanna leave you and your viewers with one thought, though. Space is hard. Delivering services in space is hard. Although we've seen a lot of evolution of technology and, you know, things like rockets launching every other week seem to be almost like delivering your new car or a routine truck roll for fixing something in a terrestrial network, delivering a reliable service when you've got your assets flying around the earth at 17,000 miles an hour in the harshest environment you can imagine, means that there is still a lot of challenges for delivering those solutions.

So, although we're seeing a lot more and proliferation will continue to happen and standards will definitely lower the bar, it's still gonna be a pretty challenging environment to offer reliable services. So, that's something else that customers and users should think about and also take account of when they're selecting a partner, a vendor, a solution set because while there'll be a lot of people saying they can [00:31:00] do it, there'll be fewer that can actually make it happen.

Jim Morrish: Yes. I mean, without doubt, the complexity of the technology that's underpinning this evolution is quite remarkable and really very, very complicated, certainly compared to as space was managed a few decades ago, at least.

We're moving on in time, we're getting towards the end of the podcast. What we should do is touch on the promised 'What the tech' segment of this podcast where we introduce a sort of a more lighthearted and amazing, or interesting news story, and I found one in fact, which I thought was quite interesting. I'd like to introduce everyone to sharks as a platform and specifically a sensing platform. So it seems that US scientists are tagging sharks with small sensors that measure ocean temperature, salinity depth, et cetera, as the animals move through the Atlantic, and when the sharks surface, the sensors transmit their data via satellites, and that creates a kind of a living sensor network for ocean observation, and researchers using this information, what they're particularly interested in the heat [00:32:00] content of oceans, you know, upper layers, which provides energy for hurricanes and influences their intensity. So this shark sensing platform effectively can help improve forecasts of hurricanes along the US East coast, and the really clever part is that scientists don't have to tell the sensors where to go. Sharks naturally travel through the ocean diving to different depths and moving across large areas. So it kinda struck me that we've spent decades putting sensors on things that get deployed in remote locations, and perhaps there's a next step, which is to put sensors on things that already know where they need to go.

Tim Last: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So animal tracking, wildlife tracking, and also as a subset of that tracking, sharks and other large fish in the ocean is something that Iridium has been involved in for most of its time in existence actually, because obviously tracking things in the oceans, you don't have the luxury of a terrestrial network of any type technology. So satellite has been used there for a long time to try to understand more about the oceans, [00:33:00] more about wildlife. The idea of making sharks a sensor platform sort of under the surface rather than just figuring out where they're going is something that I think is a sort of byproduct and a nice add-on. There are also a lot of oceanographic platforms out there, and by platforms I'm talking about, you know, buoy systems, things called profilers and drifters that are kind of autonomous vehicles that can get thrown in the ocean and do this kind of thing when the shark perhaps isn't going where you want it to go. But it speaks to the fact that if you can drive down your size, weight, power, cost for an IoT solution and put it on more and more things humanely, like a tag on the back of a shark fin, you can get more and more insights not only about that creature, but also about the environment within which they operate.

So yeah, we are very happy to support. There's a foundation in California called the Barbara Block Foundation, which is part of Stanford University that's one of the largest shark tracking [00:34:00] programmes that we support directly. But there are a number around the world that use Iridium technology and we're very proud to be part of sort of improving the understanding of and science of wildlife, both for sort of environmental and conservation reasons, but also for a better understanding of the oceans.

Jim Morrish: Thank you. It's fascinating. It seems that there's a kind of recurring theme within IoT of monitoring something for a specific reason and then finding a lot of information and finding that you learn new things that you never thought you might learn. So this kind of whole kind of rolling.

Tim Last: I think, not to dive down another rabbit hole, but I think with the advent of AI in the last few years, this brings all sorts of opportunities off the back of IoT and IoT use cases. I mean, we are finding, with a global network with several million satellite and able customers today, we are finding the insights that we're able to generate much more easily, faster. You know, we can really provide greater insights to our customers, and AI is helping enable that. So, [00:35:00] yeah, platform, that's really how we think about services around the world.

Jim Morrish: Fantastic. Thanks. It's been a really interesting conversation. But with that, I think we are running outta time, so I think we should draw the podcast to a close at this point. So thank you for joining me, Tim.

Tim Last: And great to be here, Jim. Thanks for having me.

Jim Morrish: And just a reminder to everyone listening in that you can subscribe to the Trending Tech podcast wherever you found us today, and thank you for joining us. We are delighted to have you listening in as part of a audience around the world. And we'll be back soon with another edition of Trending Tech, focusing on another aspect of digital transformation. So thanks again for joining, and bye for now.