SpaceX buying Swarm Technologies (satellite IoT provider)

[mlindner]

https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1588222248707497984

SpaceX is now advertising Swarm satellite Internet of Things connectivity on its Starlink website, with IoT service at $5 per month:

https://swarm.space

To be more precise, they added an "IoT" menu item on starlink.com which links to https://swarm.space

This is what I was referring to above. What is the potential revenue impact here?

How many additional $5/month subscribers can this offering potentially target worldwide? 10,000? 1 million? 100 million?

The satellites are built with modern components so I imagine that they could store tens of thousands of packets or more on the satellites. The major limiting factor would be per-satellite bandwidth which isn't really published. At some point there would be enough customers that the queue would build up inside the satellites such that they are receiving more packets than they can downlink. To counteract that, they'd want to create more downlink locations with possibly directional transmitters on the ground to get more throughput. I think they're still well away from reaching any kind of bandwidth limits. Also these things are really cheap to launch more of, to put it lightly. They can rideshare on literally any rocket launched by anyone and probably cost under $10,000 each to build based on my experience with building cubesats.

Swarm IoT service will be a small player at SpaceX. The bigger effect would be that the Swarm people are working on the T-Mobile integration aspect which is worth a lot more.

[RedLineTrain]

Thought I would necro this thread to put a bit of an end-cap to it.  Apparently, Swarm Technologies approach is being folded into the Starlink sat-to-phone effort, such that its VHF frequencies for IOT will be deprecated in favor of using the phone service providers' frequencies for IOT.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/20/spacexs-swarm-technologies-is-halting-new-device-sales/