Sigfox refused to die

Along with LoRaWAN, Sigfox is the other "original" IoT radio technology. In the spring of last year, the whole story was about to end when Sigfox SA, the original parent company who developed the technology, went bankrupt. In the auction, all the assets ended up in the ownership of Singaporean UnaBiz. Under its management, the operation has recovered and now Sigfox seems to be fulfilling the promises made to the technology.

Sigfox operates on free ISM frequencies and is in many ways a superior IoT technology. Then how could it be that the company that developed the technology failed in practice, even though it collected a large pot of money from the market? According to UnaBiz CEO Henri Bong, it was a matter of many factors: the timing, the business model, the signed operator contracts, actually the whole hype around IoT. In the end, the reason seems to be the ego of the Sigfox management.

- I told Sigfox's management in 2016 that the price of the connection is too low. Still, the entire IoT business was developed with the hope that there would be a billion subscriptions in 2020. The reality was something between 100200 million devices. You could say that the IoT failed all expectations.

According to Bong, an IoT business cannot be founded on hardware alone, i.e. devices. Actually, network technology doesn't matter. Every existing Sigfox operator sells complete solutions. It includes the device, network management and ready-made solutions for various applications.

There are currently around 11.5 million Sigfox devices on the market. In Finland, the 0G network is operated by Connected Finland. There are 230 thousand devices in the network. It is telling that all these devices together consume less power than a single 5G base station.

According to Henri Bong, sending one Sigfox message consumes 10-20 milliwatts of power. Henri Bong himself believes that energy efficiency can be improved even more.- I believe we will reach 1.2 milliwatts per message.

Sigfox's energy efficiency is superior. Still, Bong sees that the services and overall solution are more important. Unabiz wants to go in a technology-agnostic direction. Visio has an IoT network where messages travel from nodes to the network regardless of which radio technology or network they travel on.

This requires a translation as devices in networks built with different technologies must be able to communicate with each other. UnaBiz's solution is a light data management software layer called UnaConnect. It has already shown its power translating LoRaWAN frames into Sigfox frames and vice versa in the project of LoRa operator Actility and UnaBiz.