Remote Environmental Monitoring: Matching Connectivity to the Challenge

The Challenge of Monitoring Our Planet

Why is environmental monitoring so hard in remote areas?

Often, the places we most need data from are the hardest to reach. Accessing remote rainforests, high mountain ranges, vast deserts, polar caps and oceanic regions can be difficult, costly, and dangerous. They don’t have cell towers or power lines, and sending people out to check sensors manually isn’t just impractical, it’s unsustainable. IoT for climate monitoring has opened the door, but the logistics of gathering reliable, continuous data in these places remain challenging.

One essential component of success is collaboration. Environmental monitoring is not something one agency or organization tackles alone. Governments, NGOs, researchers, universities and private tech providers all bring pieces of the puzzle, from scientific insight to provision of physical sensor networks, to the connectivity and platforms that make data flow. When these threads are woven together, they provide a picture accurate and complete enough to act on, but without them, data is disparate, narrow, and potentially unreliable.

Today, many of these agencies rely on proprietary satellite IoT to monitor the environment and keep people safe.

Environmental Monitoring via Proprietary Satellite IoT

Proprietary satellite IoT refers to connectivity solutions built on closed, vendor specific satellite networks, platforms and hardware. With a history of reliability and low latency, they’re trusted for mission critical applications, and form the backbone of systems that send wildfire alerts from remote forests, trigger flood warnings when rivers surge, or provide SOS capabilities for Rangers far from cellular coverage. These use cases work, and they save lives.

For reference, here’s a quick refresher on a couple of established proprietary satellite services, but feel free to skip ahead if you’re already familiar.

Proprietary satellite IoT is trusted because it is proven. Networks like Iridium and Viasat offer global reach, near-real time communication, a broad range of data capacity tariffs, and connectivity that covers the most inaccessible global locations. In situations where seconds or accurate time-stamped data count, that reliability is non-negotiable.

But this approach does come with trade offs. Proprietary satellite IoT devices have added cost, limiting their widespread deployment. Agencies also face vendor lock in due to a lack of interoperability. And the data can end up siloed, with wildfire sensors on one platform, flood gauges on another, and SOS devices elsewhere. The result is a patchwork of insights that are difficult to unify. We’ve previously highlighted the problem of global data disparity and its impacts. The tension between reliability, availability and scalability, proven systems and siloed ones, defines the current status quo.

The Expanding Toolkit: LoRaWAN and NTN

Over the last decade, LoRaWAN broadened the toolkit for low power, local sensor networking, and now 3GPP’s Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) are emerging to extend cellular protocols such as NB-IoT and LTE into areas with no terrestrial networks.

It’s important to be aware that NTN coverage is still limited, so availability will be patchy for some time. Data rates are small (under 50 KB per month) and duty cycles are constrained, so plan for tiny payloads, compression, and aggressive batching. Applications must be latency-tolerant, with buffering, retry, and out-of-order handling. Unlike cellular, antenna positioning and sky view become first-order concerns, and power budgets are tighter due to longer air-time and higher TX demands.

In this expanding marketplace, there is no single winner in terms of connectivity choices. The toolkit is widening, broadening opportunities and use cases.

Within the current climate (pun intended), with high demand and fast evolving tech, the expertise lies in matching the right connectivity to the right environmental challenge, and future proofing the technologies selected.

Exploring the Deployment Realities

Let’s talk coverage: How “global” are these options?

Security: Keeping Environmental Data Trustworthy

Environmental monitoring data increasingly informs safety, regulation, and policy, so protecting its integrity matters as much as collecting it. For remote environmental monitoring, satellite IoT reduces exposure to common internet borne threats because links don’t rely on local terrestrial infrastructure or public ISPs. In practice, that means fewer attack surfaces between field sensors and your platform.

Advantages and limitations of satellite IoT security:

High Encryption Standards by Default
Professionally operated, mature satellite networks such as those operated by Iridium and Viasat encrypt data using AES-256, a symmetric block cipher algorithm recognized for its security and efficiency.

Avoids Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
Satellite networks are much harder to compromise via MitM attacks due to their direct transmission methods, reduced ISP reliance, high-altitude signal paths, and strong encryption. However, they’re not completely immune. The means by which data is routed from the ground station to the user’s application needs consideration.

There are several options here with varying degrees of security:

• VPNs / Firewalls – The most commonly deployed method for securing data being moved from a ground station is to utilize a combination of firewalls and VPNs.
• Private Wire – Private wire connections create a direct, secure link between a satellite ground station and a customer’s network, bypassing the public internet entirely. This can be achieved through dedicated leased lines or private Layer 2 circuits (such as MPLS or SD-WAN). This results in a closed, high-security data path that prevents exposure to cyber threats like DDoS attacks or data interception.

The bottom line: Satellite won’t eliminate risk, but its independence from local infrastructure, combined with private routing, encryption, segmentation, and failover, gives environmental programs a materially stronger default security posture than relying on terrestrial connectivity alone.

Building a Smarter, More Connected Planet

The future of environmental monitoring isn’t about replacing one connectivity technology with another; it’s about building hybrid IoT networks that combine the best of each. Proprietary satellite IoT will continue to deliver life- and mission-critical reliability, providing resilient links and accurate, time stamped data from even the most remote regions. Meanwhile, standards-based NB-IoT and LoRaWAN are unlocking scalable, low-cost sensor deployments bringing environmental data collection to new levels of density and insight.

When agencies, NGOs, and research partners collaborate across these ecosystems, we can turn isolated measurements into continuous, planetary-scale intelligence.