eSAT Global – which is planning to use existing geostationary satellites for IoT applications — has named Rick Somerton as regional director for Australian and New Zealand.
eSAT executive chairman David Lyon, said the company saw Australia and New Zealand as “two advanced markets with significant opportunities in agriculture, mining and energy,” adding “[Somerton] brings a depth and breadth of experience in the IoT connectivity market equalled by few and we expect he will play a key role in delivering the benefits of eSAT throughout the region.”
Somerton was previously CEO and founder of IoT Oz, a company that held the Asian regional licensee for Ingenu’s (formerly OnRamp Wireless) terrestrial based LPWAN business.
eSAT promises direct-to-satellite disruption
eSAT’s stated mission is “to bring disruptive direct-to-satellite connectivity to low cost IoT devices.” To do this it plans to use direct-to-satellite connectivity via existing geostationary satellites. To date it has announced agreements with Inmarsat and Thuraya.
“The eSAT solution requires no terrestrial infrastructure or back-haul, while providing global coverage. IoT devices equipped with eSAT communications modules directly communicate with GEO MSS satellites at a transmit power level comparable to that of a car key fob,” it says.
“Due to eSAT’s breakthrough innovations, hundreds of millions of IoT terminal devices can be simultaneously supported by the eSAT system worldwide.”
It claims its devices will cost less than $US10, cents per month to operate and last 10-15 years on batteries.
Somerton told IoTAustralia those devices would be “thumb-sized” and that eSAT Global expected to start commercial services in early 2021.
Leosats dismissed as “hype”
The company claims its unique combination of low cost, low latency and global coverage is not matched by any other existing or proposed IoT connectivity solution, including the many proposed low earth orbit satellite systems.
In June eSAT Global announced it had tested its technology on an Inmarsat satellite. Its then CEO, Henry Li, was dismissive of leosats, saying he was: “gratified to head the only company capable of demonstrating the benefits of a GEO MSS solution versus the hype of various LEO and CubeSat startups.”
Huge market advantage
According to Somerton “eSAT is on a short trajectory to having its full global network in place with unrivalled low latency, costs and battery life to challenge the best terrestrial networks, giving it a huge market advantage.”
He told IoTAustralia there were many applications for which the many minutes of latency in leosat systems make them unsuitable (data is uplinked to a satellite and then downlinked when that satellites has line of site to ground station).
Somerton is also playing down the importance of LPWAN technology, saying: “With less than one percent of the earth’s surface covered by terrestrial LPWAN networks there is a rather large gap to be covered.”
In his previous role representing LPWAN company Ingenu Somerton told IoTAustralia in 2016 that IoT OZ had a trial Ingenu base station operating in New Zealand and expected to be installing base stations in Australia later that year. He told IoTAustralia this week that plan had not come to fruition.
Ingenu announced in February 2017 that it offered coverage in 29 countries, and the list included Australia. However Somerton said he understood Ingenu had abandoned its plans to offer LPWAN services and was focussed on producing and selling its LPWAN technology.
