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Cellular Starlink expands to support IoT devices
- mvid 1y agoSo you won’t even be able to isolate devices to your home network anymore, they will be phoning home by satellite
- cma 1y agoIf anyone walks past your house with a device in the same bluetooth p2p network as your device this is already true (Amazon sidewalk). This could give them a more uninterrupted connection though.
- rightbyte 1y agoI think these e.g. Verizon guest wifi:s might be used to try to spy on us too.
- hypeatei 1y agoI'm sure this costs money to use, just like regular cell service would for the same theoretical IoT device. That's probably the main barrier to having its own network.
- pixl97 1y agoI mean, if you're looking to spy on or attack someone with wealth it's probably well worth it for some organizations.
- fc417fc802 1y agoPhoning home with a few packets here and there via the cell network is quite cheap. An adversary, pardon I mean OEM, doesn't need to upload 4k video to gain value here.
- Spooky23 1y agoRegular companies are gonna need SCIFs.
- CamperBob2 1y agoNever mind corporations, your next 'smart TV' will need a SCIF.
- RandomBacon 1y agoMy custom home, if I ever build one myself, is going to be a faraday cage.
- fc417fc802 1y agoArguably all your IoT devices already do. There were multiple startups advertising "routing at the edge" or some other such bullshit maybe ~5 years ago. I have no idea what happened with those ventures but these days multiple ISPs offer the general public roaming WiFi access via the APs of their customers so I think it's safe to say that ship has long since sailed. Come to think of it how cheap are LoRaWAN radios these days? That's another option.
- wkat4242 1y agoIt won't work very well indoors anyway. If at all. Amazon sidewalk is a much bigger threat in this regard. I'm really glad we don't have this in Europe.
- LeoPanthera 1y agoI'm pretty sure it doesn't work indoors.
- eddythompson80 1y agoThat's already possible, it's just expensive. Remember when the kindles[1] used to have the option for built-in 2G/3G connectivity "for life" to download books from Amazon that you never had to sign up for or maintain or pay for. Until networks dropped support for 2G and 3G in 2021. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G7H6AASHTERXBKNV https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
- birdman3131 1y agoSo that started out as unlimited. After people abused it to tether it got dropped to like 50mb of non amazon traffic a month.
- Gigachad 1y agoFor small amounts of data transmit only you can do LoRawan with The Things Network for free.
- edoceo 1y agoNetwork map: https://ttnmapper.org/heatmap/ https://ttnmapper.org/heatmap/
- paradox460 1y agoI've explicitly bought all my Kindles with that feature. Amazon cheaped out a few years ago and it barely works on my 3rd Gen Oasis, which uses LTE
- _Algernon_ 1y agoFuture homes will have built in Faraday cages.
- contingencies 1y agoAwesome insight.
- toast0 1y agoIf you've got stucco siding and radiant insulation in your attic, you've got the home of the future.
- wkat4242 1y agoStucco is not conductive? So it wouldn't work as a signal blocker
- toast0 1y agoStucco itself is not conductive, but it's usually applied on a base of metal mesh (similar to chicken wire, but apparently actual chicken wire isn't appropriate). Some projects use fiberglass mesh as the lath, and some may use traditional wood lath, but my understanding is the majority of stucco for house construction uses metal wire mesh for the lath.
- wkat4242 1y agoAh cool I had no idea thanks! Ps in order to be an effective Faraday cage it must also be grounded and no gaps in the metal may be larger than the wavelength that needs to be blocked. Which is only a couple centimetres (or around an inch or so) for the highest ones
- toast0 1y agoStucco mesh needs to have no gaps for its structural needs, it's commonly overlapped by 3-6 inches. And, depending on the surface, the mesh may embed into the ground, offering a ground connection (if poor)... The mesh does have many openings, but they are around the size you mention, so it should be ok-ish. Otoh, there's like doors and windows. I believe a partial faraday cage still significantly reduces signal strength though. It'a difficult to use cell networks in my parents' stucco house, but step outside and it's fine. But stucco is also very similar to concrete, so that could be it, too.
- MisterBiggs 1y agoI think more worrying is devices mesh networking with devices owned by your neighbors.
- wkat4242 1y agoExactly, like Amazon sidewalk. They market it as an easy configuration feature but it can also be used for tracking and telemetry. So your smart TV can call home even when you don't connect your own WiFi.
- fh67 1y agoIt it actually using starlink or the old swarm.space system that supported 'off the shelf' antenna
- KaiserPro 1y agoGood question, I imagine its using m2m 4g if its "off the shelf"
- wkat4242 1y agoSwarm used pretty big antennas (due to a much lower wavelength) on the ground segment. It was pretty impractical. And that frequency, starlink sats are not capable of it. Swarm's network was very incomplete, there were hours of no coverage at all. I think that they just bought it to remove a potential competitor.
- cozzyd 1y agoYeah but one rug pull, shame on you...
- inemesitaffia 1y agoRug pull? Guess who designed this direct to cell sats? The founder of SWARM.
- cozzyd 1y agoYes but presumably people designed things to work with swarm. I almost did...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sharpshadow 1y agoMore scrap parts for Russian drones.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fc417fc802 1y agoDoes this type of satellite link provide the operator with the ability to derive fine grained location data the way the terrestrial cell network does? If not, would using such a network provide a significant increase in end user privacy?
- lupusreal 1y agoStarlink by the nature of how it works, knows exactly where receivers are. Perhaps even more accurately than GPS.
- fc417fc802 1y agoWould you care to elaborate? I thought GPS required diffing extremely high resolution clock signals. Meanwhile 5G has beam steering.
- DecentShoes 1y agoAre you sure? I know the dish needs to know where the satellite is, but that doesn't mean the satellite needs to know where the dish is...
- lupusreal 1y agoThe satellites do beam forming to target the dishes. For this, the dishes communicate their location, calculated from the satellite signals in essentially the same manner as GPS, to the satellites.
- DecentShoes 1y agoFair enough.
- stavros 1y agoAre you sure the dishes don't just have GPS on them? I have no idea either way, it just sounds like a GPS receiver would be simpler.
- contingencies 1y agomonitor beehives in remote areas The European honey bee is not a native species in New Zealand or Australia. Well meaning naive people think hosting bees is a great idea. The reality is it robs the native insect population of a food source.
- nosignono 1y agoIt's more complex than that. That's like saying planting a garden robs the local ecosystem. Maybe! Maybe not! Native pollinators have different life cycles and different plants they evolved to get food from. Honeybees, likewise, will only visit some flowering plants. That may increase competition for scarce resources, or it may not. You are correct that honeybees are non-native, and that honeybees do draw a few lbs of nectar and pollen every day from the environment (up to a 3 mile radius from their hive), but it's unclear how much of that nectar and pollen is surplus from the plants or removed such that local bees experience pressure.
- contingencies 1y agoPlanting a garden does rob the local ecosystem. Even purely native gardens lack the diversity, in particular mycodiversity, of undisturbed areas. While long term native planting can move an area back toward endemic biodiversity, it is rarely or never achieved (I'm not aware of any well-cited claims to the contrary). It is similarly naive to view the introduction of a species through the lens of pollen quantity being 'surplus' or 'enough'. The presence of rival pollinators affects native insects whether or not there is a shortage of food - for example by discouraging presence, by occupying nesting sites, by altering endemic predation webs, and similar.
- nosignono 1y agoWeird. I tore up my lawn and replaced with wildflowers, native perennials, deep mulch from local leaf litter, and a small vegetable plot. I don't think I robbed the local ecosystem in the slightest. In fact, I'm fairly confident I did the opposite. But you seem convinced it's axiomatic that planting a garden robs the local ecosystem...
- everfrustrated 1y agoThe article isn't very clear but this seems to be standard fixed IoT device using a mobile SIM card is able to communicate via Starlink's mobile support. Not sure why this is news. Starlink is known to be rolling out mobile support to certain regions. Due to spectrum licencing this is working with local telcos not a Starlink retailed service.
- btown 1y agoIoT makes a lot of sense for a satellite-based network. If some amount of recorded data can be buffered on device, it can be enqueued to upload during a period of non-peak traffic, essentially using "spot bandwidth," and benefit from Starlink's extensive coverage at a much lower cost than consumer on-demand applications. Indeed, the satellite could instruct transmitters on their allocated time-slices far ahead of time, reducing round-trips and negotiation. Now, maybe all of this is already such a trivial amount of bandwidth that it's barely a rounding error to save it - but the possibilities it opens up for telemetry in remote regions are fascinating.
- cjrp 1y agoIsn't power consumption an issue though?
- thatoneguy 1y agoIt doesn't take a lot of juice to send signals straight up. Iridium has been using transceivers to do similar IoT things for decades and my old Inmarsat satphone used a fraction of a watt to get my voice up to geosynchronous orbit just so someone standing next to me on an outdoor landing could hear a message from space.
- rtkwe 1y agoThe Inmasrsats are also way bigger satellites with correspondingly large antennas and ability to sniff out the weak signals from handsets. Starlink base stations use a lot more power and idle around 15w and go up to 20-50+ while transmitting from what I can find depending on the model. A good portion of that likely comes from things like the heater (is it smart and only powers on when it's cold?) and wifi router too but it's still a lot more than older satellite phone setups. https://www.ecoflow.com/au/blog/how-much-power-does-starlink-use https://www.ecoflow.com/au/blog/how-much-power-does-starlink...
- Brajeshwar 1y agoThere is no mention of Swarm. I think, part of this is what came from the acquisition of Swarm Technologies. Swarm manufactures and operates ultra-small satellites for IoT devices. - https://starlinkinsider.com/starlink-iot/ https://starlinkinsider.com/starlink-iot/
- droneship 1y agoStarlink's official website [1] says its IoT offering uses LTE Cat 1(-bis) and Cat 4, so Swarm appears to be gone for good. [1] https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell https://www.starlink.com/business/direct-to-cell ("Empowering Mobile and IoT Connectivity" section)
- inemesitaffia 1y agoSwarm isn't gone. Swarm has transformed to Starlink DTC. The satellite designer is the same person. I believe the old spectrum is used for TT&C/PNT
- tamimio 1y agoI don’t see anything technical worthy in here, it feels like a promotional article, can we see some architecture, diagrams, components, some interesting stuff?