Proprietary startups for M2M in most of cases bad idea, especially if
they require
custom hardware (those operate in VHF band).
And with such history: <<Originally in March of 2018, Swarm had launched
satellites without FCC approval.
In December of 2018, Swarm agreed to pay the FCC a total of $900k over
five years for the unauthorized launch.
The company began bouncing back, as it closed a Series A financing round
with $25 million in January.>>
https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2019/10/18/swarm-receives-fcc-approval-to-launch-150-satellites/
Here is example, Sigfox in UK seems powered by startup, and startup went
defunct:
https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1280892048787243008
And my own experience, if you embed in your design proprietary modem, it
will be very pricey to replace it,
if startup fail to reach profit margin.
I rather will trust technologies based on open standards, like FossaSat
or Lacuna,
often they are built with terrestrial fallback, and in fact you can
build your own gateways, if required.
And more than that, some modules, like Murata, support both Sigfox +
LoRaWAN, and technically possible
to support LoRa satellites as well at same time, without significant
hardware mods.
On 2020-07-09 05:56, Mike Lyon wrote:
For the IoT/M2M stuff that doesn’t require huge amounts of data,
there is a Silicon Valley startup that is deploying cube sats for
just that.
Swarm Technologies
https://www.swarm.space/
-Mike