The Unquantifiable Future of Satellite IoT

There are always some regrets in life, such as losing small items when moving. After several relocations, I lost my first digital product - a pager I bought as a student.

Today's young people may not know what a pager is. It was a very early digital product used to inform the other party to call back. In the early days of pagers, the Ministry of Electronic Industry had once demonstrated its market size, believing that the sales ceiling in China was about 40 million units. However, due to people's extreme thirst for communication and information, the sales volume of pagers reached hundreds of millions, until it was replaced by mobile phones.

The emergence of satellite IoT system

If we look back at the predictions for the electronic communication industry since the 1990s, we can find a common phenomenon - even the most optimistic predictions lag behind the actual market development. When the era of the IoT and industrial IoT began, we could still make confident predictions. This is something that will continue to happen.

The users of the IoT are not humans themselves, but all kinds of assets owned by humans. Each person will have multiple IoT terminals on average. For people living in industrialized societies, it is not an exaggeration for each person to have dozens or even hundreds of terminals. This includes privately-owned transportation such as cars, scooters, electric bikes, and bicycles, public transportation such as planes, high-speed trains, subways, buses, and shared cars. If we consider commercial assets such as logistics platforms, logistics equipment, production facilities, and energy facilities, the number of IoT terminals will grow geometrically. If we also include natural phenomena that need to be monitored for environmental protection and disaster prevention, such as mountains, rivers, water, soil, air, and wildlife, the number of IoT terminals will be astronomical.

This prediction means that today's IoT services, including satellite IoT systems such as Tianqin Constellation, have just stepped into the blue ocean.

Development of satellite IoT

Today's IoT services have not yet fully reached the terminal, and ordinary consumers do not have an urgent need to buy services, let alone purchase satellite IoT services.

However, the stakeholders of bulk assets have recognized the value of satellite IoT services. For example, banks and insurance companies will attach great importance to asset tracking. Whoever can provide an IoT means that is not affected by terrain and fully covers the world will receive high trust and dependence.

Global asset tracking is not overly cautious. There are many unpredictable things in this world. When the "Ever Given" blocked the Suez Canal, many cargo owners did not know whether this had anything to do with themselves. If there were IoT terminals attached to some high-value goods containers at that time, the cargo owner and the insurance company could have taken timely action to mitigate losses.