The South Australian Government, through Investment Attraction South Australia is to accelerate and expand the rollout of Thinxtra’s Sigfox low-powered wide area network for IoT in the state.
Thinxtra, Sigfox’s Australian licensee, aims to have a Sigfox network covering 85 percent of the Australian population by the end of 2018. Earlier this month it announced that it would offer Sigfox coverage to aspiring smart council areas.
Thinxtra says it has already made Adelaide a priority through the city’s established IoT and Smart City ecosystem but that, under a MoU between Sigfox and Investment Attraction SA, the network will be deployed throughout regional and rural South Australia in addition to the Adelaide metropolitan area.
“The low-cost, long-range IoT network will bring significant benefits to the state’s regional and rural farmers, schools, businesses and local government including greater efficiencies and productivity,” Thinxtra said.
South Australia’s Minister for Trade and Investment, Martin Hamilton-Smith, claimed the network would “allow South Australia to generate an IoT ecosystem second to none in Australia” and also “support the Government agenda to transform the state into an innovative and creative economy, finding new ways of thinking and doing things as we move towards high-tech activities that will create the jobs and industries of the future.”
The CEO of Thinxtra, Loic Barancourt, said the Sigfox network was already live in Adelaide and the company already had strong partners in South Australia. “The local ecosystem of device makers and solutions providers are gearing up to service major customers with Sigfox-ready IoT solutions,” he said.
Adelaide aims to exploit low and high-bandwidth networks
In a separate initiative Adelaide recently joined the US-led Smart Gigabit Communities program, a non-profit organisation that fosters the development and deployment of advanced networking applications to change the way citizens live, work and learn. However that initiative is focussed specifically on exploiting high bandwidth communications technologies.
