Sigfox additions include Hungary, Switzerland, UAE, Malaysia and South Korea
French IoT connectivity service provider Sigfox has expanded its global network to 45 countries, after Hungary and Switzerland became the latest European markets to offer Sigfox’s LPWAN connectivity.
Hungary’s Omnicell IoTnet and Switzerland’s Heliot will be responsible for deploying the network in their respective markets, developing the ecosystem and supporting a variety of vertical channels.
Both companies will roll out the networks during the first quarter of 2018, initially focusing on urban, industrial and transport use cases. Sigfox said supply chain, transportation, energy management, food, agriculture, pharmaceutical and telecare solutions could take advantage of the technology.
Malaysia, South Korea and UAE are the other markets that will offer Sigfox’s connectivity services.
The technology serves around 803 million people, covering 3.8 million square kilometers. Sigfox is targeting a reach of 60 countries and one billion people by the end of this year.
“We’re very excited to welcome these five new operators to the growing Sigfox family. We have already started to collaborate with them to expand the power of the LPWAN and strengthen our ecosystem”, Rodolphe Baronnet-Frugès, EVP of Operators at Sigfox, said. “These new partnerships take us a step closer to our goal of creating a worldwide network able to support business both locally and globally, thanks to an extensive network of business partners.”
In January, Sigfox announced that Chile, Ecuador, Panama and El Salvador had become part of its global IoT network, bringing the total number of countries in Latin America up to nine, after previous network expansions into Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico, in 2016 and 2017.
The new contracts with Mintek (Chile), Semgroup (Ecuador) and Cognix (Panama and El Salvador) have been negotiated in collaboration with Sigfox’s regional partner, WND Group, through the creation of a series of partnerships with local companies who will become exclusive Sigfox operators in these four countries.
The deployment of Sigfox’s technology will start in major cities across these new markets in the first quarter of 2018.
“With the addition of these four countries, WND LATAM is now present in countries representing 82% of the GDP of the Latin America region,” Chris Bataillard, CEO of WND Group, said. The executive also said that the addition of these markets will enable WND Group to provide Sigfox coverage to over 465 million people within the next 18 months.
In September 2017, the French IoT specialist had launched a suite of new services for the provision of IoT connectivity with an emphasis on low-cost components to support manufacturing and supply chain operations.
Admiral Ivory is a simplified connectivity service which makes it possible to transform any short-range wireless device into a long-range IoT device based on a hardware component that costs of 20-cents.
Sigfox also announced a new offering for manufacturers looking to use devices globally, which means the devices can run in any part of the world. The new product, dubbed Sigfox Monarch, is a cognitive service that support connectivity worldwide by allowing IoT devices to recognize and automatically adapt to local communications standards.
Sigfox’s technology operates in unlicensed bands worldwide, with radio frequencies ranging from 862 MHz to 928 MHz. Using unlicensed bands enables devices to send their data to the cloud while using little power, at very low cost. Sigfox Monarch provides a radio recognition service enabling devices to manage the radio frequency changes, without any additional hardware such as GPS or Wi-Fi chipset.
