There will be more than a dozen new Iridium Connected midband products on the market in the coming months.
Iridium Communications Inc. has announced that its Iridium Certus 100 midband service is commercially available for maritime, land mobile, IoT, aviation and government customers.
The midband speeds can support email, messaging applications, media sharing, telemetry reporting, file transfer, internet/VPN access and up to two simultaneous high-quality voice calls. Iridium said the service can also support low-resolution video transmission for surveillance and monitoring applications when combined with partner data compression technologies.
Iridium Certus 100 debuts with several new Iridium Connected partner products and is designed to address market demand for new satcom solutions requiring small form factor and battery or line-powered mobile equipment, capable of two-way IP data and high-quality voice services.
Iridium Certus 100 is pitched as a solution for autonomous vehicles like unmanned autonomous vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, remote monitoring of facilities or equipment, and personal communications devices. The small, handheld portability of the new equipment means many devices can be battery-powered or integrated as an onboard communications system for vessels, aircraft and connected vehicles.
Commenting on the new launch, Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium, said: “Our new Iridium Certus 100 midband service is designed for applications that are agile, remote, and need more throughput than our traditional narrowband offerings, but don’t demand the speeds or larger, heavier antennas used in our popular Iridium Certus broadband solutions. The impressive number of new products coming to market from our partners tells us that we’re addressing an important new capability that has never been addressed by satellite operators before.”
Among the first products available are the SkyLink by Blue Sky Network and LT-4100 by Lars Thrane. SkyLink is a dual-mode data management solution for land, air, sea, and IoT applications, which has already been chosen for integration into UAV and USV systems. Available in each of the four mentioned vertical configurations, SkyLink is an adaptive solution with efficient size, weight and power features, making it suitable for mid-sized vessels, vehicles, remote monitoring stations, industrial IoT, unmanned systems, and government and military aviation.
The LT-4100 by Lars Thrane has been designed for professional mariners, particularly for deep-sea fishing and workboats.
Some of the additional solutions approaching commercial availability or in beta testing include the Flylogix UAV system, Ground Control’s RockRemote, the McQ CONNECT and the NAL Research Quicksilver (QS-100).