back to article Vodafone and Inmarsat hang satellites over potential Internet of Things customers

Vodafone and satellite phone firm Inmarsat have inked a deal to provide backhaul for Internet of Things devices in far-flung corners of the globe. According to this morning's Financial Times, the mobile network operator is seeking to expand into providing IoT connectivity for driverless cars, smart cities, smart farms and …

  1. lglethal Silver badge
    Go

    Farm tech...

    "Your correspondent's knowledge of farming is sketchy at best, mostly being drawn from the ill-informed BBC Countryfile programme, but this seems like a solution to a problem that thousands of years of human evolution and progress has already solved."

    In the UK I would say you are dead right, in Aus though, where some of the farms are as big as Wales, and use helicopters to do their cattle controls, I can imagine it would be majorly useful. Although I cant imagine how you could keep it cheap? Especially since those farms tend to have 10's of thousands of head of cattle. That's a hell of a lot of transmitters, and a heck of a lot of data moving over the satellite...

    1. Dan Wilkie

      Re: Farm tech...

      Australia is a good example, agriculture in Australia is pretty far along the tech curve. They're heavy users of big data and cloudy type stuff in order to optimise seeding patterns and the like

  2. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    RFIDs

    The RFIDs are read at close range (i.e. dairy) or some herding activity.

    Then a Mobile phone data connection is used.

    Satellite provides the back-haul for the conventional mobile basestation. Inmarsat is competing with OB2 / Astra / Eutelsat and others. This is NOT the expensive direct to customer satellite Terminal market. The clue is Vodafone.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    LoRaWan win Inmarsat backhaul - for farm connectivity???

    i smell marketing BS ...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe I'm being dense here but how on earth can you detect a RFID chip from a satellite?

    I think someone's milking this.

    1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

      Au contraire

      The big cheeses have the cream of their engineering staff working on it, going through each design step very Caerphilly indeed.

    2. Crazy Operations Guy

      RFID-equipped fence posts? Cow walks near the gate, it registers that cow-278390 is near gate-485. Maybe with additional poles in the middle of fields and other points-of-bovine-interest.

      At least that is my best guess.

      I also imagine that they may equip cows with GPS-enabled auto-prods to do the actual work of getting them back into the 'geofence'.

      1. Oengus

        RFID-equipped fence posts

        On many of the large cattle stations in Australia there are huge tracks (hundreds of square miles) of land that wouldn't know what a fence post is...

  5. Martin Summers Silver badge

    If you put one of these things on a sheep, that's proper cloud computing right there.

    1. Captain DaFt

      "If you put one of these things on a sheep,"

      Sounds risky. If you have the system counting sheep, How are you going to keep it up? Zzzzz...

      1. Martin Summers Silver badge

        My knowledge in these matters is admittedly a bit woolly.

    2. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

      @ Martin Summers

      Does that need much RAM, then?

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