Sigfox, the French company with a proprietary low-powered wide area network technology for IoT and ambitious plans for networks worldwide, will detail its plans for Australia at a meeting of the IoE Community Sydney Meetup group on 18 November.
Renald Gallis, VP Ecosystem & Marketing, Thinxtra will talk about the Sigfox network technology and its planned rollout in Australia.
The move is the latest in the company’s aggressive plans for network rollouts around the world. To date, according to its web site, it is present — or shortly will be — in The Netherlands, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Denmark, UK, Spain, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, Norway, Finland, Ukraine, Slovakia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, India, Colombia, Chile, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Rollout in each country is being undertaken with a network partner (the coverage web site cheekily says: “If you have faith in the future of IoT, we wonder why you are still reading this line instead of clicking on the button to become the SNO in your country!”)
The company has just announced a partnership with Glen Canyon, under which it says one million Glen Canyon smart meters will be connected to Sigfox networks over the next 22 months. According to Sigfox, Grand Canyon “has installed more than 20 million meters in China, Africa and the US, supported by its AMI, or advanced metering infrastructure.”
Spanish company Libelium, which designs and manufactures hardware and a SDK for wireless sensor networks, recently added Sigfox wireless connectivity to its portfolio of Waspmote OEM and Waspmote Plug and Sense! sensor devices.
San Francisco Sigfox’s first US rollout
In late October Sigfox announced that it would partner with the City of San Francisco to deploy a dedicated IoT network for smart-city programs and for businesses in multiple verticals. San Francisco is the first of 10 US cities in which Sigfox will deploy its network by Q1 2016, the company said.
The Sigfox technology uses ultra narrowband communications operating in the ISM (instrumentation, scientific and medical) bands, primarily 868MHz in Europe and 902MHz in the USA.
However it faces stiff competition from other technologies which are gathering multivendor support, in particular LoRaWAN backed by the LoRa Alliance, which boasts 130 members and which has just announced a certification program.
In Sigfox’s home country, France, the largest mobile operator, Orange, recently announced plans for a nationwide LoRaWAN network. Australian startup National Narrowband Networks is already deploying LoRaWAN and Telstra has dipped its toe in the water: it will use LoRaWAN for a short term trial in Melbourne.
In the US the announcement by another company Ingenu — formerly On-Ramp Wireless — of plans to deploy its proprietary LPWan technology in 30 US cities prompted a headline from Light Reading Ingenu Races Sigfox for US IoT Network Firsts and the colourful opening paragraph: “With the number of networked machines coming online expected to expand faster than a horde of rats breeding inside a New York dumpster, it’s no wonder that companies are scurrying to be the first to deploy dedicated networks for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the US and beyond.”
