VIDEO After hitching a ride on a SpaceX Falcon rocket, Barcelona-based Sateliot’s first 5G satellite will blast off into low earth orbit this morning at 2:20 a.m. EST. As SDX Central reports, the modest 22 pound unit is expected to extend 5G coverage over an 800,000 square mile area. The company is hailing it as the “First-Ever Satellite Under 5G Standard to Democratize IoT.”
The service area in question is the introductory piece of a network that will eventually comprise 250 orbiting satellites by the end of 2024, according to Sateliot. The Spanish provider’s units will support 5G-based narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) connections. The connections use 3GPP’s Release 17 non-terrestrial networks that foster communications between the satellites and earthbound IoT functions.
Occupying a low earth orbit operational field, the units circle the Earth approximately once every 90 minutes at a height of less than 1,000 kilometers, or 621 miles. Sateliot appears to be moving forward with an agreement it made last year with Amazon Web Services. The agreement involves building a fully-virtualized cloud-native 5G core for NB-IoT with Magma that will be able to communicate with the new IoT enabled satellite service.
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