Terrestrial networks — cellular towers, fiber, Wi-Fi — cover roughly 15% of the Earth's surface. The other 85% is farmland, forests, deserts, mountains, and ocean: exactly where a growing share of IoT use cases live, from agriculture and asset tracking to environmental monitoring and maritime logistics. For years, "no coverage" has meant "no data." It doesn't have to.

Closing that gap means connecting every device, everywhere — but even the technologies built for remote, low-power sensing aren't fully off-grid. LoRaWAN solved the last mile between sensor and gateway. It didn't solve the backhaul problem: every LoRaWAN gateway still needs a way to get that data from the gateway back to the internet, and in the areas where LoRaWAN is most useful, that backhaul is often the hardest and most expensive part of the deployment.

This isn't a new problem. Legacy NTN (VSAT, L-band satellite modems, proprietary satellite IoT) has offered connectivity in these areas for decades — but usually at the cost of dedicated hardware, high per-device or per-terminal pricing, and closed ecosystems that don't play well with standard cellular or LoRaWAN infrastructure. The industry has been asking: is there a better way?

3GPP Release 17 NTN is that better way — standard cellular protocols extended to satellite, using the same SIMs, same core network principles, and increasingly, the same chipsets already in IoT devices today. Skylo has built and commercially launched this network, delivering 3GPP NTN connectivity that works with existing device and operator ecosystems rather than around them.

This talk covers two concrete ways to put NTN to work today:

- NTN-only deployments — for stationary devices in remote or maritime locations where terrestrial coverage will never arrive, satellite is the primary and only connection.

- TN + NTN fallback — for mobile or intermittently-connected devices, NTN kicks in automatically the moment terrestrial coverage drops, so devices — and the data they carry — are never dark.

We'll then bring it back to LoRaWAN specifically: using Skylo as backhaul for LoRaWAN gateways in areas with no fiber, cellular, or grid power nearby. We'll compare this against alternatives like Starlink — which requires a dedicated terminal, meaningful power draw, and pricing built around broadband-scale data, poorly matched to the small, bursty payloads typical of LoRaWAN traffic — versus a purpose-built IoT NTN network sized for exactly this kind of data.

What attendees will leave with: a clear framework for when NTN-only vs. TN+NTN fallback makes sense, a practical understanding of 3GPP NTN vs. legacy satellite IoT, and a concrete backhaul option for LoRaWAN deployments that is commercially available and cost-effective today — not on some future roadmap.