French Company Building a Mobile Internet Just For Things

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @03:14PM from the series-of-tubes-for-things dept.

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."

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Re:So, what's the cute trick? by timeOday · 2012-11-13 16:09 · Score: 5, Informative

The cute trick is that this technology is extremely slow, as in, low bandwidth, per TFA. We are talking 100 bps. (Not 100 kilobytes per second, but 100 bits per second).
So, no, nobody is dumping their cellular data plan for this. But for a weather station, or "where is the bus right now?", or burglar alarms, it could be interesting.
The main "problem" I see is that more expensive, more capable networks (cellular and wifi) are already so pervasive.