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This week, we’re looking at Amazon’s satellite aspirations, how to think about Unified Namespace, and more!

Amazon filed paperwork with the FCC last week for up to 5,105 satellites for a direct-to-device constellation, running on spectrum it's acquiring through its roughly $10.8 billion purchase of Globalstar. Buried in the announcement, almost as an afterthought, Amazon says the system will deliver, alongside consumer messaging and disaster response, "IoT connectivity for remote sensors." That's a tech giant putting a satellite count and a spectrum plan behind something the satellite IoT industry has spent a decade building piece by piece.

IoT Analytics has tracked at least 13 startups and seven incumbent operators building or launching satellite IoT networks over the past several years, chasing a market that crossed 5 million subscribers in 2021 but still represented only 2 percent of total satellite connectivity revenue. These companies won by being narrow: cheap CubeSats in low Earth orbit, purpose-built for asset tracking, agriculture, and maritime use cases where terrestrial coverage doesn't reach. Iridium, ORBCOMM, and their newer competitors weren't trying to be everything to everyone. They were trying to be the thing that keeps a shipping container's temperature sensor reporting when it's three weeks from the nearest cell tower.

Globalstar's mobile satellite services spectrum was already licensed and already serving Apple's satellite messaging — Amazon bought its way into a regulatory position that would have taken years to build from scratch. Analysts noted at the time that the deal was as much about catching up to SpaceX's Starlink D2D push as it was about any specific IoT ambition. The IoT use case reads, at this stage, like a feature riding on top of a much bigger consumer and defense-oriented bet.

The industry's near-term path runs through combined NTN/cellular SIMs, automatic network switching, and pay-as-you-go pricing that brings satellite costs down to roughly a dollar per kilobyte — a deliberate, incremental build from connectivity-as-a-service providers stitching together existing MNO relationships. Amazon's approach is closer to owning the whole stack: spectrum, satellites, beamforming, inter-satellite optical links, all under one roof, with IoT along for the ride rather than the design center.

Amazon's D2D system is still a filing, not a network, and its own broadband constellation is only now reaching initial service. But IoT Analytics flagged this exact dynamic years ago: tech giants building broadband LEO constellations that could double as backhaul competitors for dedicated satellite IoT providers, without ever designing for that market first. A company that can absorb a decade of losses changes the economics for everyone else in the sector, whether or not it ships a single IoT-specific feature. Watch how Iridium, ORBCOMM, and the smaller satellite IoT startups price their services over the next year — that's where the pressure will show up first, long before it shows up in feature comparisons.

The Unified Namespace is an architecture, not a product. The messaging layer underneath it is a real decision — here's how to make it deliberately.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Wienke Giezeman, CEO and co-founder of The Things Industries, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss how IoT is finally delivering what it promised ten years ago. The conversation covers what changed technically and commercially, the ROI of IoT, why deployments failed in the early days, criticism of IoT, what companies still get wrong about LoRaWAN, and The Things Conference 2026.

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