What is series: What is Sigfox?
Nicolas Windpassinger
Deep expertise in: Prosumer I Solar I BESS I Channel I Low Voltage I Medium Voltage I Electrical Vehicle I Startup I Advisory Board
When speaking and sharing with a lot of you, I decided to start a"What is?" series of blogs to share the knowledge that is out there and bring some insights. The first post is about Sigfox.
Sigfox is one of the leaders in the market of non-cellular LPWA network or LPWAN wireless communication technologies. The company was founded in 2009 in France.
Since IoT adoption grows and the role of connectivity and data is essential both Sigfox and the other major player in the unlicensed band LPWA space, LoRa, have been growing rapidly in recent years.
As mentioned in my IoT book Digitize or Die, the wireless landscape is made up of many acronyms and protocols. To begin classifying the most known technologies and protocols, we will use network range as a first filter. A network range is typically categorized into 5 classes:
- Proximity, body area networks – covers all wearable devices (including implants, surface mounted on the body, etc.)
- WPAN: Wireless Personal Area Network – covers a range of about 10 meters to 100 meters
- WLAN: Wireless Local Area Network – covers a range of about 100 meters to 1000 meters
- WNAN: Wireless Neighborhood Area Network – covers a range of about 1000 meters to 10 km
- WWAN: Wireless Wide Area Network – covers a range above 10km (as big as the entire globe of needed)
The aim of Sigfox is to build the first global public LPWA network. You could compare Sigfox in a sense to a mobile operator, yet for a very specific type of connectivity: lower power, wide range and IoT-related only. The company calls itself the 'global communications service provider for the Internet of Things'.
Sigfox has benefited from its first-mover position in Europe and in 2017 Sigfox, which is both the name of the company and of its LPWAN technology and offering, accounted for most public LPWAN connections across the globe as LPWA connections research found.
Sigfox has a very specific approach whereby it only offers public LPWAN possibilities. While the number of private LPWAN connections has been higher so far (and dominated by LoRa and LoRaWAN, the topic of my next post), by 2023 public networks will capture over 70% of LPWA connections (cellular and non-cellular) according to ABI Research.
Characteristics of the Sigfox network
Because of its ‘global IoT service provider’ approach Sigfox works with companies, of which several are investors, that dispose of infrastructure (essentially towers for its Sigfox antennas). The business model of Sigfox, which is privately owned, requires a large ecosystem of partners, including the ‘Sigfox network operators’, and high investments to keep rolling out globally and to innovate.
- SigFox uses the Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) – sub GHz ISM band with radio frequencies ranging from 862 to 928 MHz (depending on the region). A good video they posted on their website: https://www.sigfox.com/en/sigfox-iot-technology-overview#popin-235-1
- Sigfox devices use small messages (12 bytes uplink and 8 bytes downlink) with up to 140 messages per day. A Sigfox gateway can handle 1.3 million messages per 24 hours maximum, thus if each object transmits 10 messages per day this would be 130K objects.
- The network redundancy is achieved by overlapping cells coverage of 3 gateways. As the spectrum usage is not optimized this mean any message use the spectrum available to 3 gateways and thus its cell capacity is approximatively 130K / 3 = 43K objects/cell.
- A cell’s range, in rural areas, is between 30 to 50 km and in urban areas between 3 to 10 km. The standby time for a 2.5 Ah battery with SigFox access is about 20 years.
Sigfox innovations and use cases
Since my book was published Sigfox has announced several new features and services which are key for its development:
- The Sigfox Monarch cognition service enables more use cases as it enables devices to recognize and manage radio frequency changes autonomously, depending on the region the device is in.
- Sigfox has also been working on IoT interoperability whereby IP on LPWAN devices would enable to complement cellular LPWA technologies, such as NB-IoT.
Traditionally Sigfox has been mainly used in typical non-cellular LPWAN IoT use cases, from smart city applications and smart buildings to smart agriculture, smart homes and manufacturing.
The mentioned ‘technical specifications’ help you see in which use cases it fits best. Yet, with the Monarch service Sigfox has broadened the (potential) number of use cases, for instance in logistics and supply chain management where asset tracking and maintenance beyond local applications is now easier. A typical example is asset tracking in shipping.
On top of the core Sigfox IoT connectivity service, Sigfox also offers solutions such as Monarch, Sigfox Geolocation and an onboarding process service for partners.
Early 2018 Sigfox said it is available in 45 countries with coverage for little over 800 Million people.
Vice President of OPEN | Brazil
6 年#Congratulations
GPS Group
6 年Hi Nicolas we met in Boston couple of years ago, our company is the first partene of Sigfox Eco System in Ecuador.? We are testing Sigfox metro signal capacity and trying to match with Schneider's solutions for IOT deployment.? We saw this comming from our meeting back then and pretty exited about it.? Are you going to be at Sigfox Connect 2018 in Berlin?
Conseiller Entreprise Industrie & International
6 年Very good article.. Thank you very much !
Senior Director @ Premier Tech | Corporate Development Professional | President & Board Member | Globetrotter & Intercultural Expert
6 年Very informative thank you
As the winner of the 5G NTN Antenna Award , I am happy to inform you about my 0 USD antenna concept and more – contact me!
6 年Nicolas Windpassinger very nice written. Sigfox is focusing on IoT because they have only one product to sell: connectivity. It is rise or fall with connectivity. The other players offer connectivity and some more. If they fall or run in trouble then they will not die because they have other business fields to make money. Some remarks: - 2.5 Ah is telling nothing because energy is Voltage x Ampere x Time. I explained this in the past - Your calculated connected devices is without interference at gateway. It is upload only. The Sigfox gateways offer 4 download messages with 8 byte per device and day only - The 5 to 50 km at the news of the unlicensed #LPWAN technologies are plain marketing. I explained the real here https://www.gsm-modem.de/M2M/iot-university/lpwan-coverage-range/