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French Company Building a Mobile Internet Just For Things
holy_calamity writes "France now has a dedicated cellular data network just for Internet-of-Things devices, and the company that built it is rolling out the technology elsewhere, says MIT Technology Review. SigFox's network is slower than a conventional cellular data network, but built using technology able to make much longer range links and operate on unlicensed spectrum. Those features are intended to allow the service to be cheap enough for low cost sensors on energy infrastructure and many other places to make sense, something not possible on a network shared with smartphones and other consumer devices."
"It's a Internet,, for THINGS!!!!!"
I'm going to start counting download speeds in 15 bits/sec/hz now so I'll be ready for when it hits Texas.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Hmm... Long range, works on unlicensed spectrum, low power and cheap for client devices. How, exactly, are they planning on keeping other people(either competing operators or individuals) from setting up their own gateway hardware and skipping the delightful world of the cellular data plan model and having their every device phoning home to an untrusted 3rd party?
Do they have some sort of remarkable improvement over current low-power/low-speed RF links(zigbee, bluetooth, and friends) that is patented, proprietary, and only client chipsets are for sale, with base stations remaining in-house? If so, do they seriously plan to avoid the scrap heap of ghastly, non-interoperable unlicensed band RF links? If not, what is the new element that allows them to achieve the impressive range numbers where presently available low power links(especially if the ISM band is noisy) tend to be pretty lousy, and worse if you need to use omnidirectional antennas and deal with buildings and other clutter?
If they can perform as promised, this seems like it would have to be based on some very neat RF tricks; but I have to wonder what sorts of hobbling they will be doing to maintain their subscriber base on a technology that runs in unlicensed spectrum...
It even uses the same parts of the spectrum as the well established Zigbee devices that do exactly what's described here.
A sort of internet for slow things. - Which is not as useless as it sounds. If power and water meters could communicate and relay usage information towards the nearest node it wouldn't really matter whether that information gets there in 2 minutes or two hours. Same for appliances sending out error or service codes.
If you look at T-Mobile's financials, they're doing horribly with consumers. On the embedded side they're growing like crazy.
Embedded is perfect for 2G/EDGE: low data usage, occasional connections, reliability. T-Mo could become -the- provider for embedded monitoring and make a fortune.
It's not sexy, but it's profitable. The should buy Orbcomm and go end-to-end.
So you hook up your "things" to this network and they start sharing data, like time you turn off your home heater.
If that kind of data falls into the wrong hand, others will know what time you go out of your house every day and when you come back home.
Data like that might be very valuable to TPTB and also to people with not-so-nice intentions.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So if I move to France I can FINALLY control my coffee maker and blender from my computer? The boyhood dream born out of a 1977 Radio Shack catalog and the groundbreaking X10 technology to control thngs that don't actually need controlling is made possible by Europen beaurocratic perfection. No wonder so many people suddenly want to move abroad.
So much for the "it's Obama's fault" theories. LOL
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Finally my croissant will be able to talk to me when I am not at home!
"You know——for things."
One day, apparently soon, we'll be able to hook up Things to The Internet.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
what about zee intefrerece yiu englisch typs !?
zee it known zthat zee intefrerense c'est' une major reasonne de bas ecoutage in zee urbain areas ! four instanse, vith WMBus 169 , wich iz zee mandatory frequenzy for gas - burb ! , sorry , trop aioli ! - pour zee gas metereing withz 169 mega Hetzrtz en veritè is wuerry but wueery bad in zee urban areas duet too zee stuff that emits all sortz of spurious zignsals, n'est pas ?
comment pout cette frequenzy do ore better zhan all zee other stuf whic is bazically zee same on very very similar frequenzies ?
yiur mother waz a hamster anz your father a huckleberry...I spit on your frequenzy, you englisch typs !
Must be great for finding exploitable home appliances. When is the last time you updated the firmware on your TV or your fridge? Wouldn't it be great if it were on an open network?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Fsck yeah! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
Surely the greatest thing since Minitel. By the way, how is Quaero coming along?
The European research and development program with the goal of developing multimedia and multilingual indexing and management tools for professional and general public applications (such as search engines)? It's continuing, but it was never meant to be a Google rival.
The German engineers split and favor a text-based search engine, while the French engineers favor a multimedia search engine. Many German engineers also balked at what they thought was becoming too much of an anti-Google project, rather than a project driven by its own ideals.
In that foreign market called the US? Who cares.
The article doesn't tell you anything about the technology used or what development they've done. So I assume you don't know more than that? Could it possibly be that the concepts sound similar but the implementations are in fact different? Maybe there's more to this than simply claiming it's Zigbee in disguise. Who knows?
The UK is doing it properly http://www.weightless.org
Utility HAN networks run on unlicensed spectrum and connect your utility meter(s) to your fridge, thermostat, A/C system, washer/dryer, furnace, and other items, to help you better understand your electricity and/or gas and/or water usage.
hate the digtal storm in the air get hyper of that only my brain dus not untherstand the communication, the red one of t'pau sing about that china in youre hands wordles at lest i must have a cable else it disapears someday