What I'd build with today.
A working tech radar for satellite IoT and adjacent connectivity — updated from the field, not from press releases.
Production-ready. Use with confidence.
Starlink Business / Maritime
Mature LEO broadband, mainstream for vessels and remote sites.
LTE-M & NB-IoT
Reliable for low-power telemetry where coverage exists.
Containerised edge gateways
Docker/Podman on industrial gateways is now boring — in a good way.
MQTT Sparkplug B
Default southbound for IIoT brownfield modernisation.
Pilot in non-critical workloads.
3GPP NTN (Release 17/18)
Standards-based satellite IoT — chipsets shipping, ecosystem still young.
Iridium Certus 9704 modules
Compact L-band for IoT-class telemetry, strong global coverage.
Multi-IMSI / eUICC eSIM
Multi-carrier resilience without bespoke SKUs.
Tiny-ML on industrial RTUs
Anomaly detection at the well-head, not in the cloud.
Track closely. Build a POV.
Direct-to-device (AST / Lynk)
Promising for consumer-grade pings; not yet for industrial SLA.
OneWeb Enterprise IoT
LEO play with strong enterprise channel — watch service maturity.
Post-quantum VPN for satellite links
Long-lived assets need ciphers that outlive the asset.
5G NR-NTN handsets
Track silicon timelines; could reshape M2M economics.
Don't start new work here.
Single-carrier roaming SIMs
Lock-in and outages. Move to eUICC.
Sigfox-only deployments
Migration path required — pair with NB-IoT or LoRaWAN.
Custom firmware per device family
Standardise on a runtime, deploy apps as containers.
Want this radar applied to your stack?
A two-week tech-radar engagement maps your current bearers, devices and platforms against this view — and gives you a written transition plan.
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