Building a device that works everywhere has always come with a hidden tax: extra components, extra board space, extra complexity, and a bill of materials that quietly kills the economics of scale. For IoT developers targeting use cases beyond terrestrial coverage, that tax has been particularly punishing–until now.
Iridium Communications recently unveiled the 9604, a satellite IoT module that collapses three technologies–Iridium Short Burst Data (SBD) satellite service, LTE-M cellular connectivity, and GNSS positioning–into a single 16 mm x 26 mm x 2.4 mm platform.
The result, Iridium says, is a module that cuts board space by 60∞ or more compared to traditional multi-component designs, simplifies power architecture, and finally makes dual-mode IoT connectivity viable for price-sensitive, high-volume deployments.
The problem is being solved
The satellite IoT module market has long been split along technology lines. Satellite connectivity meant one module; LTE-M meant another; GNSS positioning meant a third. Integrating all three into a single product required bespoke engineering, more PCB real estate, more power management complexity, and inevitably, higher costs– making it practical only for enterprise-scale deployments with the budget to match.
The 9604, built on the u-blox SARA-R5 platform, attacks that problem directly. Tim Last, Executive Vice President at Iridium, laid out the value proposition plainly:
“By integrating cellular, GNSS, and Iridium satellites into a single, power-efficient module, we’re giving customers the flexibility to design and deploy lower cost, smaller, power-efficient, and location-aware solutions without the burden of integrating multiple components,” Tim said, adding that with their best-in-class proprietary satellite IoT service and upcoming standards-based NB-IoT service debuting this year, anyone thinking about IoT beyond terrestrial networks will look at Iridium first.
What the beta programme already proved
Iridium didn’t arrive at this launch cold. The 9604 beta programme–launched earlier this year and notably oversubscribed–gave a select group of companies early access to the module, and the feedback coming out of it is unusually concrete.
Alastair MacLeod, CEO of Ground Control, one of the early developers, described the impact on his company’s product economics in terms that any hardware team will immediately understand. “Utilising the three-in-one module has already fundamentally changed our product economics. We eliminated two components from our bill of materials, reduced our board size, and simplified our power architecture,” he said.
Additionally, MacLeod noted that having dual-mode connectivity options enables a smarter, location-aware network selection in their application. “The Iridium 9604 turned what would have been a complex multi-component design into a single-module solution. This is a breakthrough for our IoT solutions.”
Dean Welten, CEO of Everlink, echoed the operational angle: “Our customers require essential data and real-time intelligence to operate with confidence anywhere in the world. By integrating the Iridium 9604 with our secure cloud platform, we can now enable global connectivity, greater operational efficiency, and measurable impact at scale.”
Where this satellite IoT module is built to go
Iridium targets the 9604 at applications that have historically been the hardest to serve affordably: vessel tracking at sea with cellular fallback in port, global asset tracking with location-aware network routing, energy management in remote infrastructure, precision agriculture equipment, and government and emergency response deployments.
These are environments where “works everywhere” isn’t a nice-to-have–it’s the entire product requirement. The module ships with a unified AT command set, an SDK, reference designs, and an Iridium 9604 Development Kit–all designed to reduce integration time and get products to market faster. Commercial availability begins in June 2026.
Part of a bigger IoT strategy
The 9604 isn’t a standalone product move–it’s the first of three IoT service paths Iridium is now formally offering. Alongside the 9604, the company’s IoT portfolio spans Iridium NTN Direct for standards-based direct-to-device connectivity using third-party chips, and Iridium Messaging Transport (IMT) for industrial-scale, larger payload capabilities via the Iridium Certus 9704.
The direction is clear: Iridium is repositioning from a satellite-only provider into a multi-mode connectivity platform company. For IoT developers who have long had to stitch together their own “works everywhere” stack from disparate components, a single satellite IoT module that handles the hard parts — and fits on a much smaller board — is a genuinely different proposition.
Three technologies. One module. And a beta programme that was oversubscribed before most people even knew it existed.
(Photo by Iridium)
See also: Satellite IoT market set to quintuple by 2028
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