Sigfox is a proprietary Low-Power Wide-Area Network player who is betting big on asset tracking. Currently, asset tracking accounts for 80% of Sigfox’s revenues. At the end of this year they expect to have close to 16 million connected devices. This pales in comparison to the 1 billion devices they plan to have on their network in four years. In order to achieve this scale though, Sigfox will need to find a way of avoiding having to change millions of IoT device batteries. The article that follows describes their strategy and provides more detail on how they plan to execute on getting there.
Sigfox CEO and co-founder Ludovic Le Moan said that with 16 million devices expected to be connected to its network by the end of this year, the company believes that having 1 billion devices connected to Sigfox by 2023 is an attainable goal.
Sigfox said it is enhancing its network connectivity for the Internet of things (IoT), and announced new deployments, modules and partners at its third annual event for its partner ecosystem and customers this week (see Sigfox debuts ‘private area network’, or PAN).
Sigfox has taken to referring to itself as the ‘0G’ network, on the premise that mass deployment of IoT is about enabling the communications of tiny amounts of data through ultra-low power consumption devices.
Low power consumption is one thing, but the key to getting to 1 billion connected devices is enabling connectivity at extremely low cost, which is why Sigfox has developed a US$0.20 reference design and is also experimenting with energy harvesting to power remote connected devices, significantly improving longevity by removing the need to replace batteries so often. Sigfox believes that if it can help address the cost and energy consumption barriers, it can achieve its one billion target for 2023.
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