5 ms·

Good comparison between Swarm and Iridium SBD from 2022. Latency on Swarm transmissions can be very high. https://nootropicdesign.com/projectlab/2022/07/30/swa

• gnfargbl 4y ago
  I read your comment on latency and thought "eh, can't be so bad, most of the applications for this will be near-real-time alerting for equipment failure and physical intrusion, and those applications can cope with a few seconds extra latency." By goodness, I was some distance out -- according to that link, the average latency on Swarm is about 40 minutes, and it can be as much as two hours. With that level of latency, I really am struggling to think what this could be useful for. Historic environmental monitoring, OK. What else?
  • xbar 4y ago
    "Historic" is a extreme for a 40 minute latency. Maybe we could call it non-emergency environmental monitoring. Also, remote facility tampering monitoring or remote system monitoring. If it's going to take you 2 days to get to a place to address an issue, 40 minutes to get notified seems fine.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • Scoundreller 4y ago
    I’ve been wanting to set up something like this for a remote cabin to turn on the heat some hours before we arrive when it’s really cold. But even $5/month seems like too much for us. If it was pay per use, that’d be great. I was excited by helium but it seemed too difficult to setup. Wasn’t surprised to find out that nobody was actually using it for, you know, data.
    • mynameisvlad 4y ago
      If you already have bought and maintain a vacation cabin, is $60/yr really that much?
      • alex_suzuki 4y ago
        Personally I would say no, given that you could do other things via that link that are not just convenience, e.g. intrusion alert.
      • Scoundreller 4y ago
        It’s a real dump with messy ownership, I assure you. It’s actually for future planning in case we sort out the ownership and install a heat source that isnt just the wood stove.
    • sleepybrett 4y ago
      I do this by calling the full-timer living on the same cul-de-sac as the family cabin. Maybe costs me a beer if he drops in to say hi.
      • therein 4y ago
        So the family cabin has landline connectivity too then, or cellular coverage.
        • sleepybrett 4y ago
          the first, it could, the second .. certainly not at&t which i can only get a single bar of if i stand on a certain spot.
  • mlyle 4y ago
    Current website says: "Those experimental payloads have helped the company improve its overall latency, so now it can guarantee latency at under one hour (meaning a Swarm satellite passes overhead any given point on Earth at least once an hour)" A lot of the use cases are interesting. There's e.g. automated weight tracking of cows in pastures as a use case.
  • jon-wood 4y ago
    40 minute latency is fine for a ton of use cases where you'd want connectivity in the middle of nowhere. Things like reporting the state of remote pump stations on long pipelines, or data acquisition from animal trackers for example - in those cases you're comparing latency to the time it takes to send someone out in a 4x4 and grab data, not an LTE connection to the mobile network. [Edited to add the pump stations are probably a bad example, as my understanding is that it's pretty routine now to run fibre along the pipe for things data reporting]
  • jandrese 4y ago
    I've seen these sorts of latencies on truck tracking satellite networks. Because the trucks upload timestamped records in databursts the latency isn't an issue. They're used more for accounting than anything else.
    • yencabulator 4y ago
      Note, this service is capped to 192 byte message roughly once an hour. Even assuming driver rest period doesn't need data, is 384 bytes enough to summarize an hour of driving?
      • jandrese 4y ago
        A lat/long for every 5 minutes would work out to exactly 192 bytes, and you could definitely compress this by storing only delta values with fewer bits. But really you would probably drop it back to every 10 minutes so you could add in fuel level,vehicle ID, driver ID, and a few other bits of data.