Back to blog
IoT & M2M Iridium

November 26, 2019

Ground Control Delivers SBD Data to AWS Platforms

Whatever the function, Iridium short burst data (SBD) is a tried, tested, and cost-effective method of getting IoT data back to you via satellite from anywhere on Earth. Rock Seven (now trading as Ground Control) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have now taken this one step further by allowing the data to be transported directly into Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues. This is done via a CloudFormation stack which creates the customer’s queues and takes care of cross-account permissions.

This new offering saves developers time in dealing with TCP sockets, byte-arrays, and proprietary protocols. While there may be a degree of background work, Ground Control can help, with minimal strains on resource times. It also helps people already using AWS to easily integrate with Ground Control devices.
 

Ground Control CTO, Ric Searle, said: “We’re already expert at leveraging AWS to build and scale our own IoT applications. Broadening this offering to help our customers get data into their own applications just makes perfect sense, and really speeds up application development.  Our customers can focus on their business logic, rather than wasting effort re-engineering the data ingestion layer.”

 
Ground Control customers are already adopting this new offering. A recent example is an established Agritech organisation working with farmers in remote areas. They are using Iridium Edge and RockBLOCK products supplied by us to report on critical crop data from remote locations. To add to this, the needs of this customer were urgent as they were constrained by seasonal requirements.

Ground Control helped to integrate the global reach of Iridium, robust equipment such as the RockBLOCK and Iridium Edge, and the cutting-edge processing inside AWS – and gave the customer the solution they needed in record time.

In summary, this collaboration shows that:

  • SBD is ideal for M2M/IoT applications
  • Ground Control can help get your IoT data into the Cloud
  • SBD equipment typically has small form factor and low power requirements
  • Ground Control are Iridium SBD and AWS specialists
  • Iridium SBD provides truly global coverage for IoT requirements.

Is Iridium SBD right for your project?

We are SBD experts; we've been designing and manufacturing devices that work on this network since 2005, and we're very well placed to help you find the right product and airtime for your requirements.

Complete the form, or if you prefer to speak to someone directly, call us on +44 (0) 1452 751940 (Europe, Asia, Africa) or +1.805.783.4600 (North and South America). Whether you'd like a quote or just friendly and impartial advice, we're here to help.