{mprestriction ids="1,2"} Iridium Solar is an intelligent, secure and maintenance-free solar-powered remote asset management device with over-the-air configuration capabilities. The six companies selected to participate in beta testing include CLS Telemetry, Everywhere Communications, Marlink, M2M Data Corporation, Rock Seven, and Tesacom.

As part of this process, Iridium Edge Solar is undergoing a multi-continent deployment that will push the device's limits for applications including Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), fisheries management, asset tracking including freight and containers, oil and gas and heavy equipment telematics data reporting. In addition, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enabled smart device applications are being tested to allow users to maintain remote asset management and monitoring from their smartphone and/or tablet. Iridium Edge Solar enables real-time, two-way communication, over-the-air configuration changes and local wireless capabilities over BLE, anywhere in the world.

"The Iridium Edge Solar is the new gold standard for the solar-powered satellite IoT device world, but at an incredibly cost-effective rate," said Bryan Hartin, executive vice president, sales and marketing, Iridium. "Our beta partners will be pushing the device to its limits in a wide array of environments, ensuring it meets the industry-leading quality and reliability standards for which Iridium is known.

"Iridium's partners play a pivotal role in bringing our new technologies to market and we're looking forward to commercially launching Iridium Edge Solar with their help before the end of 2020."

Traditionally, solar-powered asset tracking devices have faced several challenges that would limit field life and result in questionable reliability. Through complete encapsulation of vital electronics, the Iridium Edge Solar conquers common problems such as water intrusion, limited operating temperature, long-term reliability or degraded battery capacity over time. With military-grade ruggedised packaging and an innovative dual-power system, the Iridium Edge Solar combines solar rechargeable batteries with a separate high-capacity battery ensuring data delivery even in low-light conditions.

When combined with Iridium's global coverage and services like Iridium CloudConnect, which simplifies integration with Amazon Web Services, any organisation will be able to rapidly scale and deploy a reliable, solar-powered asset-tracking device anywhere on the planet for up to 10 years without maintenance. {/mprestriction}