Satellite IoT: The Volume Market
How large is the opportunity in connecting sensors and machines directly to satellites, and who is competing for it?
Chapter summary
Satellite IoT connects devices that send small amounts of data from places without terrestrial coverage: shipping containers, livestock, pipelines, farm equipment, vehicles, buoys and utility meters.
Key takeaways
- 1
It suits satellites well because messages are small and tolerant of delay, and because the 3GPP NB-IoT NTN standard lets cheap standard modules connect directly.
- 2
Iridium, Skylo, Viasat, Globalstar, Sateliot, Myriota, Swarm (SpaceX) and Chinese operators compete in it.
- 3
Revenue per device is low, typically a few dollars a month or less, but device numbers could reach hundreds of millions by the mid-2030s.
Key figures in this chapter
- ~80M
- satellite IoT devices, 2030 (Setcoin base)
- $5–30
- revenue per device a year
- ~$1.2B
- IoT D2D revenue, 2030 (base)
- +9%
- Iridium commercial IoT revenue growth, 2025
Source: Setcoin base case; Iridium
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