The decades-old “satellite-IoT” race, in which Internet of Things devices connect to satellites in orbit, has reached an inflection point in 2026. Satellite-IoT is growing in response to a rising need for connected devices in applications including livestock tracking, wildfire detection, global supply chain monitoring, pipeline and grid sensing, and other industries where network connections can be sparse or expensive.
Many anticipated satellite-IoT use cases will require two-way signaling, carrier roaming, or continuous availability—all things that are common features for cellular networks. That’s why the telecom standards body that created 4G and 5G has, as part of the development process for 6G, already settled on a satellite-IoT protocol that will make use of the upcoming generation of cellular tech, to be available sometime around 2030.
But 6G won’t work (or work well) for some IoT devices, because they won’t use SIM cards, or they’ll have tiny sensors that need years of battery life, or they’ll operate on networks that need to stay strictly private.
That means that a window currently exists for alternative technologies to stake their claim in the growing space. That’s exactly what two aerospace companies, Kinéis and Hubble Networks, have done in recent months, in their efforts to lock up enough hardware, customers, and infrastructure to stave off the oncoming challenger.
LoRa Satellite IoT Deployment
At the IEEE International Conference on Communications last week, the Toulouse, France-based satellite operator Kinéis presented the results of its early satellite-IoT commercial deployment—25 microsatellites in low Earth orbit, opened to customers in June 2025. A team of company representatives and university researchers made the case that LoRa—a radio protocol developed for long-range, low-power IoT—fits a world in which millions of cheap sensors are all communicating with orbiting network hubs.
“LoRa is explicitly designed to address terrestrial and satellite IoT use cases without requiring additional firmware,” a Kinéis company spokesperson told IEEE Spectrum. They added that the version of LoRa that the company uses, one that continuously hops across carrier frequencies to reduce signal collisions, will span a coverage area “thousands of kilometers of diameter” per satellite, while serving thousands of users simultaneously.
The company spokesperson said that while 6G’s satellite-IoT market “will expand with a more exponential curve,” the niche will remain in place for low-power alternatives to 6G and its precursor standards today.
“There is room for both [6G] and LoRa-based satellite-IoT, as they answer to different needs,” they said.
In the International Conference on Communications paper, a team of researchers from French and Swiss universities, along with two Kinéis collaborators, described the results of a 2024 experiment involving test signals transmitted using comparatively lower frequencies, in a band long associated with wildlife tracking and ocean buoys.
The group experimented with an ultra-efficient protocol that transmits only data packets and error correction bits. (Most signals contain preambles and reference sequences. Which for an energy-constrained chip like a tiny IoT device means wasting battery on unnecessary overhead.) The researchers found that a low Earth orbiting satellite overhead could pick up 100 milliwatt pings sent from the ground. Signals using the experimental protocol, the researchers found, could be deciphered even when ambient noise outpowered the signal—by a factor of nearly 27 to one.
Hubble Network Bluetooth Satellites
While LoRa squeezes every efficiency from purpose-built radio hardware, the Seattle-based startup Hubble Network is promoting a different approach to satellite-IoT. Using a low-energy standard developed by the Bluetooth consortium, Hubble Network’s seven satellites can pick up signals from any device with a Bluetooth chip.
“The receive sensitivity that we have with our satellites is roughly the same receive sensitivity as devices have with the GPS network,” says Hubble Network CEO Alex Haro. “So anywhere a GPS device could get a lock, it could send a Hubble packet and be received by our satellite.”
In April, the company announced a new partnership with the Irvine, Calif.-based sensor startup InPlay. The companies are developing technology around a range of supply chain and logistics applications.
“The use cases that we’re focused on are what IoT was meant to be,” Haro says. “Which is, how do we connect everything and eventually get everything an IP address? How do we do things like track every package ever shipped, so that we can help solve the porch pirate problem and the massive insurance liabilities in shipping? Or how do we keep track of every pallet to make moving of materials and food much more efficient?”
Some Bluetooth chips, whose pings Hubble Network’s satellites can receive from orbit, are approaching the price of RFID tags—the latter of which require cumbersome RFID reader devices as well. Whereas Bluetooth chips using the Hubble Network, Haro says, talk directly to satellites overhead.
“If you could have a global network that works with a 10-cent Bluetooth chip, you can really start to solve these interesting problems, like how do we keep track of every package that UPS has shipped?” Haro says.
Haro notes that, unlike anticipated 6G satellite-IoT standards, Hubble Network is uplink only. “And our users find a lot of value in that,” he says.
According to Petar Popovski, professor of connectivity at Aalborg University in Denmark, Bluetooth seems “quite limited as a standalone satellite-IoT contender.” Without a viable downlink, he says, a Bluetooth device on the ground can whisper messages to low-Earth orbit. But two-way, standalone communications require both a receiver and a transmitter.
Popovski adds that while LoRa wide-area networks were designed to send and receive long-distance signals, LoRa assumes “predominantly uplink-dominated traffic, which is well-suited to sensor reading but creates structural limitations for bidirectional applications.”
Both LoRa and Bluetooth, in other words, will ultimately struggle to compete with 6G for applications that demand steady, two-way connections between IoT devices below and satellites above. Such higher-bandwidth, bidirectional satellite-IoT connections are expected to underpin future tech innovations in smart cities, autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, digital twins, and remote surgery.
NB-IoT NTN and 6G Satellite IoT
Strictly speaking, the anticipated 6G satellite-IoT protocol is currently called Narrowband Internet-of-Things Non-Terrestrial Networks (or NB-IoT NTN). While a version of NB-IoT NTN was ratified in 2024, it will become far more useful for more applications when it is rolled into broader 6G standards in the coming years. And for all the name’s unwieldiness, the standard itself remains the frontrunner for many anticipated satellite-IoT markets in the coming decade.
Which still leaves plenty of room for competition, as Kinéis’ and Hubble Networks’ recent product developments and announcements reveal. Meanwhile, Kinéis and Hubble Networks are themselves far from the only companies working today to connect remote devices to the sky.
Legacy satellite-IoT operators Iridium (located in McLean, Va.) and Globalstar (located in Covington, La.) have served industrial customers for years using proprietary protocols. Myriota, a startup based in Adelaide, Australia, recently developed a satellite-IoT payload designed for lunar deployment that pushes the technology’s frontier deep into cislunar space. And the Mountain View, Calif.-based Skylo is already offering commercial NB-IoT NTN service via geostationary satellites. The same standard that’s now on the pathway to 6G, that is, is also a player in the current satellite-IoT race.
And it’s expected to be a tight and competitive race for at least a few more years. According to industry analyst Johan Fagerberg at the Gothenburg, Sweden-based Berg Insight, satellite-IoT built on cellular standards “will probably win the narrative after 2030, especially once 6G specifications are ready.”
He adds, however, that unlicensed technologies like LoRa and low-energy Bluetooth “will not disappear and will be relevant for ultra-low-cost, low-payload, long-battery-life devices where users value simple modules and private/hybrid networks.”
Which is why, Popovski says, the clock is now ticking. “The window for building durable lock-in is real but likely time-limited,” he says.
Kinéis, Hubble Network, and every other contender in satellite-IoT are running hard against each other today. But the real finish line ahead is 2030, when the rules of the whole contest change.
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