A Skylo Technologies executive told Mobile World Live the company remains bullish about its prospects for providing satellite-based IoT services to various enterprise verticals, as attention shifts towards how non-terrestrial networks (NTN) could be deployed for critical use cases in areas lacking traditional connectivity.

During the MWC Las Vegas event last week, VP of carrier partnerships Paul Hanton said there are opportunities in various verticals including automotive, agriculture and critical asset management.

He is so confident about Skylo Technology’s prospects he left Google three months ago after a nine-year career.

“I came to Skylo knowing what I was getting myself into,” he said. “They’ve been working with chipset makers. They’ve been working with module manufacturers to enable a hardware ecosystem that IoT makers can take advantage of.”

“The partners that I’ve been meeting here this week have been educating me along the way.”

“They’ve been explaining to me that we’re on this arc of ideation through deployment, but it seems much more accelerated than it has been in perhaps any other implementation that they’ve seen so far.”

Skylo Technologies has direct-to-device emergency messaging agreements in place with Verizon and Google, and partnerships with six satellite networks including Viasat and Ligado Networks.

The company has installed nine earth stations covering multiple different geostationary satellites, delivering a signal across more than 50 million square km.

For critical asset management, Hanton said enterprises will have a good sense of how a piece of equipment is operating in a remote location.

“There’s so much opportunity for additional coverage over the surface of the earth that it opens up.”

“It’s going to create and stimulate new ideas and new concepts that perhaps we haven’t thought of before.”

He said the service could also be used to extend the reach of terrestrial services.

Hanton said Skylo Technologies’ is working with companies across the globe, not just the US.

“What’s unique about the value proposition that Skylo brings is that an MNO or an MVNO or an IoT integrator can engage with a very mature ecosystem of solutions today.”

“In the NTN space, getting to market quickly and being able to take a leadership position as an MNO, or an MVNO, on NTN is a very powerful thing.”