Mountain View, California, Feb. 10, 2021: Swarm, developer of the world’s lowest-cost live satellite communications network, today announced that the Swarm network was now commercially ‘live’ and available to customers.
Swarm claims to have become the “first” low-cost satellite provider to offer commercial services to every point in the world, and across industries like agriculture, logistics, maritime, to name a few.
Legacy satellite solutions have historically been extremely expensive, with complex and power-hungry hardware and a poor customer experience. Swarm is trying to break into this market with an affordable pricing tag.
Founded in 2017 by Sara Spangelo, former systems engineer at NASA and GoogleX, and Ben Longmier, former CEO and Founder of Aether Industries (acquired by Apple) and postdoctoral fellow at NASA Johnson Space Center, Swarm rapidly moved from concept to commercialization, developing all the hardware and software required to run its global data service completely in-house.
Swarm’s technology consists of satellites the size of a grilled cheese sandwich that provide complete and redundant global coverage, and a satellite modem — the Swarm Tile — that is designed to be embedded into a customer product.
The Swarm Tile can be integrated into a wide range of IoT devices, providing them with connectivity to the Swarm global satellite network and two-way data transfer. Compact, lightweight, and low power, the Swarm Tile is ideal for low-bandwidth, battery-powered use cases, said the company.
“The value of data is not obvious until you start collecting a lot of it, but the cost of communications in very remote locations has been a barrier to achieving this,” said Bruce Trevarthan, founder and CEO of New Zealand-based Layer X Group in a written statement. “The low price of Swarm’s satellite communications services removes this barrier entirely, making it viable for our customers to collect increased amounts of data on a more regular basis.”
With the commercial launch of the industry’s first ubiquitous, low-cost satellite data service, Swarm enters 2021 with significant momentum including:
- Expanding its constellation of satellites from nine to 81 satellites in the past 15 months to deliver ubiquitous data service all over the world. In January, the latest 36 Swarm satellites were launched on a SpaceX rocket and are fully operational.
- Increasing the number of new customers on the Swarm network by over 400 per cent from the third to fourth quarter in 2020, during the company’s early access program.
- Transmitting 600 percent more data packets over the Swarm network in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to the quarter prior.
“Now that the Swarm network is commercially available, we are thrilled to begin providing affordable global IoT connectivity to a growing number of customers around the world,” said Sara Spangelo, CEO and co-founder in a statement. “Too many companies have had to bear the high cost and complexity of traditional satellite solutions because it was their only connectivity option. Many more companies have been unable to access the benefits of connectivity due to its prohibitive costs. Now, for the first time, companies can access low cost connectivity that covers every point on Earth. Swarm gives businesses the ability to gather critical data and make more informed decisions, regardless of location, while spending 4x to 20x less on satellite data than before.”
- TheSwarm Tile ($119 per device) is a low-power, easy to integrate modem that can be embedded into any new or existing IoT device.
- At $5/month per device, Swarm’s data pricing is four-to-20 times less than other existing services, with no hidden or setup fees.
Image credit: Swarm