Internet Of Things - ARTIK/SIGFOX
Samsung has invested an undisclosed amount to the French network operator SIGFOX (techcrunch.com), and also demonstrated its ARTIK? development platform which comes with integrated SIGFOX out of the box!
Well what in-store for us, what this even means, one might think? ARTIK platform, less SIGFOX, reduces to just another developer platform, which incorporates a Microprocessor and supporting peripherals, which can be programmed by the developer for particularly anything. It can be a weather-station, a dancing-robot or even an intelligent cooking appliance. This market already flooded with celebrities, such as Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, while lesser-known but much capable purpose built platforms often find its way into consumer products in abundance. So what it means to us, when ARTIK comes packaged with SIGFOX? Well, honestly, not so much at the moment, but it has all the potential to change the landscape of connected devices, and surely be a game-changer in IoT platforms, where others will soon follow.
To appreciate the significance, it’s best to understand the problems IoT faces today. One of the four pillars of IoT (Reacting, Processing, powering and connecting) is Connectivity. Current IoT connectivity technologies mainly revolve around 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi or BLE in general. First 3 require more power, while later two lacks range. IoT means everything everywhere. So the people whom have brain to spare, was working on the problem for quite some time hidden inside their labs, have found the solution to be UNB (Ultra narrow band) modulation schemes, which use very low power while allowing great distances (many kilometres) across. It seems the use of UNB dates back to world war one, and submarines of that era appeared to have used the same technology for underwater communication. Translating this technology to the modern world, a moderately big modern city can be covered under a half-a-dozen of repeaters/towers, with acceptable building penetration. What’s the catch? I am glad you asked. The trade-off is on bandwidth. Interestingly, that may not even be a trade-off from the angle you look at. A wise man once asked “who wants to stream videos to a shoe?”
The wise man’s question summarizes the significance of UNB in today’s IoT landscape. Many of the IoT applications at large only requires small amount of data, few times a day. If we engineer our solution within a boundaries of capabilities (UNB, for instance), we soon will be harnessing the true power of IoT.
More on the subject; Riding the wave