Telefónica and Sigfox said to be already speaking with customers in the asset-tracking, smart-metering industries.
Sigfox, a French-based provider of connectivity for the internet of things, and Telefónica inked a global deal to integrate Sigfox’s low-powered connectivity into the operator’s managed connectivity platform.
The deal will see Telefónica´s integrate its managed connectivity platform with Sigfox’s cloud platform, which is expected to give the telco the ability to develop its own end-to-end IoT solutions based on Sigfox’s connectivity and include device integration, data collection and management.
Sigfox said both companies are already in discussions with customers in the asset-tracking and smart-metering industries to deliver mass IoT rollouts across Europe and Latin America in 2017, including countries in Telefónica´s footprint such as Spain, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil, as well as in the U.S. and France. WND, Sigfox’s partner in Latin America, is said to have already started discussions with local Telefónica entities in the region.
The deal is part of Telefónica’s global low-powered wide area strategy relying on licensed technology such as narrowband-IoT and LTE-M, and non-licensed technology such as Sigfox.
“The simplicity of Sigfox’s connectivity solution and its global IoT ecosystem are a great complement to our IoT connectivity technologies and our LPWA strategy,” said Andres Escribano, IoT connectivity business director at Telefónica.
Sigfox said its network is currently available in 31 countries and on track to cover parts of 60 countries by 2018 – covering a population of 486 million people. Current markets include the U.S., Germany, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Colombia, Spain, France, Finland, the U.K., Italy and Japan.
