Q. What is Swarm Technologies?

A. Swarm provides the world's lowest-cost global, two-way satellite connectivity network for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. With 93 of its extra-small satellites currently in orbit, Swarm supports customers across a range of industries including maritime shipping, agriculture, energy, logistics & transportation, global development, environmental research, and more. Swarm's uniquely small satellites provide global coverage and are well-suited for low-bandwidth use cases such as asset tracking and sensor monitoring.

The year 2020 brought extraordinary challenges that forced many to overcome and find atypical solutions. As 2021 is being welcomed with open arms, there is a renewed sense of hope and optimism, knowing that governments and pharmaceutical companies are working tirelessly to roll out the COVID-19 vaccines with the intent of safely returning people to everyday life and a sense of normalcy soon.

Postal delivery companies face a highly competitive landscape as customer expectations have evolved. The demand for fast delivery times, low prices and exceptional service has driven rapid innovation: new solutions are needed in order to meet the needs of smart cities worldwide. Postal companies must also reach customers in rural areas, which are often much more difficult to serve due to inaccessibility and lack of infrastructure able to handle communication demands. Rural postal customers also tend to be older, which can present technological literacy issues.

Densely populated urban cities are now home to an incredible 83% of all people living in the United States. As more people flock to the opportunities and culture available in urban areas, the risk of flooding is rising dramatically. In fact, flooding resulted in $45.9 billion in economic losses in 2019 alone.

I designed my first product using the Serial Digital Interface (SDI) back in 1996, and little did I know that this fledgling coax-based video interface standard would dominate my career for the next 20+ years. Back then, SDI was limited to carrying Standard Definition (SD) digital video at 270 Megabits per second (Mbps), but would evolve to higher and higher data rates to carry High Definition 720p, 1080i and 1080p, and most recently 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) video, at cable lengths that were not thought possible. The convenience of a low cost single conductor coaxial copper cable, capable of carrying 4K video up to 100m has meant that SDI has become the de facto AV connectivity of choice in markets such as broadcast, Pro AV, medical and surveillance.

With governments increasingly recognizing the need to control energy consumption and reduce waste, the requirement to make utilities smart is not only desirable, but also the law in many countries. Although the needs of electricity, gas and water utilities are different and highly specific, each utility type requires similar foundational technologies in terms of smart devices, connectivity and data processing.

There are plenty of reasons to deploy an Internet of Things (IoT) network in a rural area. But connecting dozens or hundreds of sensors to a network can also be a nightmare. Wind turbines or oil wells benefit from sensors measuring their respective environments and performance, but their operators should count themselves lucky if such energy harvesting facilities happen to be in range of robust cellular networks so they can stay connected to the Internet. The same is true of cargo containers crossing an ocean on a ship; they could be easily tracked with individual identifying devices, but at sea, they need satellites to transmit and receive signals at all.

Bouygues Construction Matériel, a subsidiary of one of the biggest global construction groups, Bouygues Construction, is implementing an innovative asset tracking solution for smart construction. The solution, offered by Omniscient, is connecting 20,000 pieces of equipment for remote real-time management and optimization, using a LoRaWAN® network from Bouygues Telecom, the expertise of Objenious and intelligent sensors from Abeeway, a subsidiary of Actility, a global provider of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity.

With the move to a more distributed workforce as well as an increasing number of staff permanently working from home, businesses are opting for smaller huddle rooms for ad hoc meetings and remote collaboration. Also taking advantage of the power of today’s personal computing technology, businesses large and small are relying less and less on dedicated, permanently installed video conferencing systems. These days, it is quite commonplace for users to drive the meeting and room technology using their own devices, and collaborate using the latest video conferencing software tools. This is often referred to as a “Bring Your Own Device” meeting, or simply BYOD. However, since the entire meeting experience relies totally on the user’s device and meeting software, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom, this application is more often termed BYOM for “Bring Your Own Meeting,” with users simply benefiting from the available audio and video peripherals of the meeting space they are in.

When it comes to AV signal switching and extension over standard copper category cabling, Semtech offers two high performance platforms: AVX chipsets for point-to-point AV extension applications, and the BlueRiver® AVP series of devices for AV-over-IP and Software Defined Video Over Ethernet (SDVoE™) network-based applications. Both solutions take advantage of standard Ethernet technologies, typically operating at 10Gbps, to support transmission of high bandwidth 4K60 video with uncompressed image quality. However, when video bandwidth does not require the full 10Gbps, both AVX and AVP can operate at the 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps Ethernet rates. The benefits at operating at these lower data rates includes significantly longer cable reach over high performance category cable, or reuse of existing network cable infrastructure designed to carry lower data rate Ethernet.