Hiber has announced that its nanosatellite-powered IoT network is now live, claiming 90% global coverage and 75 customers in commercial trials. However, its three flagship customers indicate that the company has seriously agricultural leanings. Perhaps more customers will go public and dispel this image, but for the time being, it illustrates the cozy niche that satellite IoT services fill.
This is, of course, the ability to connect any device out in the field that has a view of the sky, without incurring any of the build-out cost associated with the terrestrial LPWAN networks. Of course, LoRa deployments can be very low cost too, but the collective satellite IoT industry has been very aggressive on the pricing front.
There’s no reason that agricultural customers couldn’t just slap a LoRa gateway on a barn and wire it up to a power and ethernet connection. However, with satellite, the sales pitch is that this is an even easier deployment process, without any of the capex costs. Agriculture was one of the key use cases that we identified in our LPWAN forecasts, where U-LPWAN would thrive, but of course, it is a use case that the satellite crowd are going to pursue with vigor, due to the slow buildout of terrestrial LPWAN in rural locations.
Hiber is calling the service Hiberband, consisting of just two satellites currently – both launched in late 2018. Two more are due in Q1 2020, but it means that the daily message limits are going to be quite low, as these devices can only send a message to the network when a satellite is passing overhead, in its orbit. As more satellites are added to such nanosatellite constellations, this issue of availability diminishes, but it is something to be very wary of in the early days.
The launch consists of two offerings – the Hiberband Direct, and the Hiberband Via. The former is a modem and antenna that will connect directly to Hiber’s satellites, while the latter is a gateway that can run LoRa, Bluetooth, or WiFi. The Via option is most flexible, and might prove more popular, as you don’t have to try and integrate satellite modems into existing devices – instead relying on the gateway to handle that link. This also lets you take advantage of the indoor coverage of these other protocols, which satellite does not enjoy.
However, we do have to take Hiber to task with its claim that “existing terrestrial networks (like Lora, NB-IoT or GSM) only work in urban areas.” That is just patently false, and the only benefit of the doubt we can give Hiber is that it is trying to explain a quite technical concept to dummies.
Hiber says that this market is a $100bn opportunity, and that its Hiberband network “is disrupting global connectivity by empowering individuals and organizations to reliably transmit data (text message size) from the world’s most hard-to-reach places for less than a dollar per month per device with its state of the art end-to-end service.”
This is leagues cheaper than a conventional satellite connection, but there are around a dozen other nanosatellite rivals that are chasing prices at this level. Some are claiming less than $5 per device annually, although it is worth stressing again that these very low prices are subject to very low bandwidth constraints – meaning that your particular business case has to be able to manage on perhaps one message per day.
And of course, Eutelsat has just confirmed its Eutelsat IoT First network offering, in a curious announcement that made no mention of Sigfox – a key partner in the LEO project, which uses the Sigfox protocol to connect nanosatellites to devices on the ground. We aren’t super confident about Eutelsat’s success in this market, however.
Interestingly, Hiber does have some other LPWAN connections. In September, it announced its partnership with Actility, one of the larger LoRaWAN providers, which will see Actility offer its ThingPark (awful name) customers the option to use Hiberband connectivity for any devices that are outside LoRa coverage. It’s not a particular elegant solution, as you would need to have devices with both LoRaWAN and satellite capabilities, or a satellite bridge for LoRa devices in the field, but it is an indication that the two ecosystems could work closely together.
Laurens Groenendijk, Managing Director Commercial and co-founder at Hiber (and co-founder of JustEat and Treatwell) said, “We are extremely proud to announce that after only 3 years of hard work, Hiberband is the first network of its kind to become operational on a global scale. We have the team, partners, technology and regulatory building blocks in place to shortly be the industry leader. With full freedom to operate everywhere in the world, we are looking forward to supporting our customers wherever they need to be.”
Hiber was initially called Magnitude Space, and was founded in 2016. It has raised some $14.5mn to date, including money from the Netherlands’ government and the European Space Agency. With over 40 staff, there are plans to launch 50 satellites, to expand the constellation.
The three aforementioned customers are Royal Eijkelkamp, which is using Hiberband for soil moisture monitoring, Centaur Analytics, which is using it for crop and post-harvest monitoring, and an unnamed company that is monitoring beehives using the satellite connectivity.
Sotiris Bantas, CEO at Centaur Analytics said “Earth’s growing population combined with climate change is placing enormous stress on the world’s food supply chain. The lack of transparency in the chain is causing about one third of the crops in the world to be wasted before consumption. Together with Hiber, we are now able to effectively monitor crops after harvest globally – no matter the location. This means that Centaur and Hiber together combat food waste and promote sustainability, while at the same time providing new business opportunities for producers, traders, and CPG companies.”