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Silicon Valley To Get a Cellular Network Just For Things

Posted by Soulskill on from the apparently-this-is-happening dept.

An anonymous reader writes "MIT Technology Review reports that French company Sigfox will soon roll out a cellular data network in the San Francisco Bay Area aimed exclusively for low-bandwidth, low power devices such as household appliances and sensors. It's the U.S. debut for a technology already in use in France. The network uses the 900 MHz unlicensed spectrum used by cordless phones. Sigfox says that and their technology's very low bandwidth makes it possible to connect devices significantly more cheaply than with conventional cellular modems and service."

10 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why do I want my household appliances sending usage data to who knows where?

    1. Re:Why? by __aaodwx104 · · Score: 2

      The NSA needs to know what you're up to when you're not within reach of a computer or cell phone, silly. "You wouldn't be worried about it if you weren't guilty of, er.. something, hold on while, yup, there's my probable cause." Knock, knock, "We have a warrant open up!"

    2. Re:Why? by crashumbc · · Score: 2

      The use case will most likely be comercial. a cheaper way to connect atm's,parking meters, and vending machines to a data network for credit card transactions...

    3. Re:Why? by NewWorldDan · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's called equipment monitoring. I make a monitoring system for stand-by generators. It turns out that there are laws about how often you can run your generator in a non-emergency fashion in some states. My monitoring service costs a tiny fraction of the fine for an incomplete log book. As an added benefit, it can automatically notify your maintenance company that the generator needs repair or fuel.

      No one cares about connecting your toaster to the internet. However, there are a lot of monitoring applications that can really benefit from a low cost low bandwidth service.

    4. Re:Why? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Why doesn't your water and gas use the pipe its connected to for data transmission? Yes, its trivial to send data down a 'pipe in the ground'

      I think this comment alone reveals why you are wrong about everything. It really isn't easy to send data down an existing, in place pipe. They don't even know exactly where half the pipes are because they were installed over 100 years ago and the records are long gone, or refer to landmarks that no longer exist. Believe me, they would love to send data down a pipe because at the moment they have to use RF, and it is very short range when in a utility pit that is basically a Faraday cage.

      But hay, if you think it is trivial, patent the idea and sell it to them. You will be incredibly rich because you solved a major problem for a multi-billion pound industry.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. PG&E by Ion+Berkley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They're rather late to the game, PG&E has been running a 900MHz ISM IPv6 mesh network for several years over the whole of Silicon Valley, every electricity meter is a node, with gas meters relayed via the electricity meters, and indeed the same radios proliferate many other places in the world.

    1. Re: PG&E by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      To be fair, their system is a bit different. The main idea appears to be that they uses an ultra narrow band signal (fancy way of saying very low bit rate) to increase the range of a transmitter operating in the unlicensed ism band where power is limited to 100mW. They are claiming up to 40km. This means they can effectively set up a low cost network that doesn't need spectrum licenses.

      The general principle is just a Shannon theorem trade off between bit rate and SNR in a power limited channel. For remote industrial sensing applications with very low data rate requirements this system could certainly be useful, though in the end I'm not sure why you would pay sigfox when it would be easy enough to roll your own. For household users this is probably of little use.

    2. Re: PG&E by Ion+Berkley · · Score: 2

      No, it's not different at all in most senses...technically they are governed by the same legal rules stated in 15.247 (ISM device power is not limited to 20dBM BTW), and most definitely the same Eb/N0 curves. There's pretty good odd's that they even use the same fundamental radio IC. What's a little bizarre is why anyone would want to trade bitrate for range in such an application, the rest of the world is not interested in range, but capacity, so the smaller the cell size, the more cells you can pack in and the more customers you can serve. There's no cost advantage in 100 bps vs 100kbps, its the same single chip IC technology in the $2 range. You might be able to argue it's slightly more energy efficient, but it wouldn't be a strong case with contemporary technology. Plus when you cap the potential bitrate for a single arbitrary device then you cap the range of services. Better to have higher bitrate and very low duty cycle for future proofing. In truth the RF part is uninteresting its mature technology, what makes anything like this potentially more interesting is what gets layered above it.

  3. Re:Dumb. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That sounds like saying that we don't need CAN and I2C because we have USB.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  4. Re:Dumb. by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

    and LIN, TWI, 1Wire, LVDS, CSI, RS232,485,422....