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This week, we’re looking at the latest in satellite connectivity for IoT, weighing private LTE versus Wi-Fi for industrial IoT, and more!

Standard NB-IoT devices can now roam between terrestrial cellular networks and a LEO satellite constellation — no proprietary hardware, no firmware changes, no custom integrations. Telenor IoT and Sateliot announced the partnership in late May, built on Sateliot's implementation of the 3GPP Release 17 Non-Terrestrial Network standard — the same protocol layer as existing NB-IoT infrastructure, which means a device already in the field doesn't need to know it's talking to a satellite. Field tests in Spain showed Telenor IoT SIM cards holding connection to Sateliot's network for extended periods, with multi-country expansion tests coming next. Sateliot has also signed deals with Turkcell and Telefónica España this year, suggesting the NTN-over-LEO model is moving into commercial volume rather than staying a niche.

Terrestrial networks cover roughly 15–20% of the planet's surface — adequate for urban deployments, but a hard constraint for anything that moves through or operates in remote terrain. Pipelines, open-ocean shipping, agricultural equipment in low-density regions, remote infrastructure — these use cases have always had a clear IoT value proposition and a connectivity problem that didn't fully resolve. The traditional answer was purpose-built satellite hardware: separate devices, separate management platforms, separate cost structures. Operators working across coverage boundaries either accepted that complexity or designed around it by limiting where they deployed. The Telenor-Sateliot model replaces that with a single device on a single SIM that switches networks based on availability, closer to how cellular roaming works than anything the IoT industry has previously had access to at this price point.

Agriculture and maritime are the immediate beneficiaries — both involve assets that move continuously in and out of cellular coverage, and both have historically absorbed the cost of workarounds. But the list extends to wildlife and environmental monitoring in remote terrain, cold-chain logistics on transcontinental routes, utilities managing distributed assets across rural service areas, and oil and gas infrastructure at the edge of cell buildout. What these share is that the IoT deployment calculus has always been clear except for the connectivity piece. Satellite hardware that required its own integration layer made many of these deployments uneconomical. A device that handles both terrestrial and satellite natively — especially as NB-IoT module costs have dropped into the low single digits — shifts that math.

Most deployed NB-IoT devices today don't support 3GPP Release 17 NTN, so the near-term opportunity is concentrated in new deployments. Sateliot's constellation is still building out, and country-by-country regulatory approvals will pace the coverage expansion. These are the normal constraints of a commercially launched technology iterating toward scale, and they matter for anyone trying to plan around this now rather than in two years. The more significant shift is structural: the satellite and terrestrial stacks, which have operated as separate industries with separate hardware ecosystems for decades, are converging at the protocol layer. Once that's true, the device design implications ripple outward — power budgets, antenna specs, SIM provisioning, connectivity management software.

For teams currently scoping deployments that involve remote or mobile assets, satellite fallback is worth including in the connectivity architecture conversation at the start rather than as a retrofit. Device selection and SIM strategy that account for NTN compatibility now will age better than designs locked to terrestrial-only coverage.

The cost and complexity premium for satellite has been shrinking for several years. Now there’s a path where coverage doesn't require a separate hardware family to support it.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Matthias Wagner, Founder and CEO of Flux, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss AI-assisted hardware design for IoT. The conversation covers the historical challenges of hardware design, the current capabilities of AI tools, compressing the hardware iteration cycle, integration challenges, the limitations of AI, and enabling IoT innovation.

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