How Skylo and Soracom Are Expanding IoT Beyond Cellular

Written by: Ryan Carlson Published: October 28, 2025 IoT Advice

Tags: Satellite IoT | soracom beam | Soracom VPG

I’ve talked to a lot of people building the next generation of connected devices, but my recent conversation with Satender Yadav, Director of Global Sales Engineering at Skylo, was one of those rare moments where you feel the edges of the possible stretch outward.

We weren’t talking about faster 5G speeds or clever new antennas. We were talking about how to connect the 85% of Earth that has no cellular coverage at all.

That’s where Skylo comes in, and why the integration between Skylo’s non-terrestrial network (NTN) and Soracom’s cloud-native IoT platform is such a big deal.

This isn’t just another MVNO reselling satellite access, this is the point where cellular and satellite start behaving like one seamless network for architectures built to support hybrid radio networks.

What I Learned About Skylo

Skylo operates an NTN satellite network that extends standard 3GPP cellular coverage into space. That’s not marketing spin, either. It’s literally part of the same specification that defines LTE and 5G. Instead of connecting to a cell tower on Earth, an NTN-compatible device connects to a geosynchronous satellite orbiting about 35,000 kilometers above the planet. From there, the signal relays back down to Skylo’s ground infrastructure and into the cloud.

On paper, that sounds complicated. In practice, Satender described their approach of simplifying the process as serving up “network on a plate.” 

If you’ve ever inserted a SIM and connected to LTE, you already understand how Skylo works. The same SIM, the same radio interface – just a different sky-facing base station.

The real beauty is that developers don’t have to rethink their hardware. 3GPP Release-17 modules, the same radios you’d use for LTE-M or NB-IoT, can already talk to Skylo satellites once authorized.

Skylo even certifies off-the-shelf modules from Quectel, Murata, Sierra Wireless, and others, meaning teams can pick hardware that’s ready today instead of waiting for some future chipset.

That’s how they’ve turned “space-grade” into “developer-ready.”

Why Satellite Matters for IoT

When we talk about IoT, we usually mean “cellular IoT” – but here’s the uncomfortable truth: cellular only covers about 15% of Earth’s surface.

The other 85% includes everything from offshore wind farms to agricultural sensors, pipelines, shipping routes, and livestock that wander well beyond tower range.

In all of those cases, NTN satellite IoT isn’t a luxury – it’s the missing leg of global connectivity.

What surprised me most in the discussion wasn’t the technology, it was the commitment to accessibility and simplicity.

Skylo’s network isn’t built for streaming or bandwidth-hungry applications; it’s built for IoT. That means adopting a design philosophy that values efficiency over excess: thinking in terms of packet size, transmission frequency, and the relative importance of each message versus its cost to send. In satellite IoT, the rules change. It’s no longer about maximizing megabytes of data but prioritizing meaningful bytes of data.

Connected devices usually send small payloads (typically under 1.2 kilobytes) for high-value events like:

• Temperature excursions in cold-chain logistics
  
• Pressure or level readings for propane tanks
  
• GPS coordinates for livestock or asset tracking
  
• SOS alerts for lone-worker safety

And because Skylo uses the same standards as cellular, devices can switch between networks automatically. You don’t need a second radio, bulky satellite terminal, or crash course in orbital mechanics.

Where Soracom Adds Its Special Sauce

This is where the partnership gets interesting. Buying access to the Skylo network through a traditional reseller is a bit like buying access to raw bandwidth instead of a purpose-built delivery network. You’ll get signal and send data, but will lack the granular tooling needed to optimize and control data use for remotely deployed devices.

We’ve integrated Skylo’s NTN network directly into our platform, just like any other carrier in our network. This gives satellite users access to the same management, routing, and security tools that already power millions of cellular IoT connections worldwide and the means to prevent expensive overages.

Here’s what that means in practice:

Unified Management

Activate, monitor, and control cellular and satellite SIMs from the same console, with a single bill and consistent APIs. No new dashboards. No separate support queue. Just one network, extended into orbit.

Smarter Data Transport

Skylo’s narrowband channel is efficient, but every byte matters. That’s why Soracom Beam is such a perfect companion.

Beam acts as an in-cloud translator. Your device can send tiny UDP packets, and Soracom automatically converts them into HTTPS or MQTT for your cloud service, handling all the TLS encryption in the cloud, making direct device-to-cloud communication possible.

In one of my own tests transmitting temperature and humidity data, I saw data usage drop from hundreds of bytes to just 17 bytes per message using a binary protocol. That’s a game-changer when your data travels 35,000 kilometers each way and real efficiency comes from embracing bytes, not megabytes.

Private, Secure Routing

With Soracom Virtual Private Gateway (VPG), traffic from your devices never touches the public internet. Whether you’re using AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, Soracom can deliver packets directly into your private VPC through IPsec VPN, VPC Peering, or Transit Gateway.

That means your IoT traffic stays private from the field to your backend – no public IPs, no exposure.

One Network, Many Paths

Skylo extends coverage. Soracom makes it controllable. The same SIM can choose the best available path – be it Wi-Fi, cellular, or satellite – based on conditions your device firmware defines.

You can even build rules for “when to switch” based on the value of the data. A simple “I’m fine” status can wait for LTE. A critical fault or safety alert can trigger an immediate satellite send.

In other words: use the right network for the right job, automatically. Soracom has tools for making this possible and giving you control over the cost of operating devices in extreme remote conditions.

A Broader View of Connectivity

Talking with Satender reminded me how far we’ve come since the days when “satellite IoT” meant lugging around an Iridium phone or wiring up a dish the size of a steering wheel.

The convergence of cellular, satellite, and cloud-native services isn’t just about coverage, it’s about continuity.

We’re entering a phase where devices don’t care which network they’re on, only that their data gets home safely and efficiently. Developers can design once, deploy globally, and trust that Soracom and Skylo will handle the logistics.

It also changes the economics of connectivity. When you combine Skylo’s affordable NTN access with Soracom’s ability to minimize on-air overhead and handle encryption, you move from “possible” to practical – changing satellite connectivity from being a last resort to being part of the plan.

Where It’s Going Next

This partnership doesn’t just fill in the coverage map, it redefines what “global IoT” means.

By bringing NTN satellite and cellular connectivity together under one unified architecture, Soracom and Skylo are quietly solving the toughest problem in IoT: making connectivity reliable, efficient, and invisible.

You don’t have to think about whether your device is talking to a tower or a satellite anymore. It just works.

And that’s the kind of magic we love at Soracom – the kind that looks simple precisely because someone else handled the physics.

🎧 Listen to the Full Conversation

If you’d like to hear the full discussion, including real-world use cases, technical deep dives, and some candid laughs about latency and physics, listen to the Skylo episode of What to Expect When You’re Connecting.