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IoT network provider said it now has access to 230,000 sites across the country.
SigFox is extending its Internet of Things (IoT) network to 100 cities across the United States in 2016 after the France-based company signed up with owners of tower, rooftop and billboard sites.
The company said the partnerships give it access to more than 230,000 sites and will enable it to better serve sectors such as logistics, smart cities and agriculture.
SigFox’s IoT technology has been dubbed low power wide area (LPWA) networks and uses unlicensed, low-frequency spectrum. It is designed to provide cheap, energy efficient, wide-area network coverage suitable for connecting large numbers of devices and transmitting small amounts of data over long distances.
The company is now present in 18 countries and said it has registered over 7 million devices on its network. It recently entered the Middle East market for the first time after striking a partnership with Oman’s incumbent operator Omantel, and is also now present in Latin America with a network deployment in Brazil.
Allen Proithis, president of Sigfox North America, said the U.S. is a huge growth market for IoT connectivity, “especially in smart cities, utilities, shipping and agriculture sectors that require large-scale and cost-effective communication.”
The company cited forecasts from IDC that suggested North America would have the world’s third-largest installed base of IoT units (7.5 billion) by 2020 and, correspondingly, the third-largest market for IoT-generated revenue ($1.9 trillion).
Sigfox competes with rival proprietary LPWA network providers including LoRa and U.S.-based Ingenu, which plans to build public networks across the globe based on its random phase multiple access (RPMA) technology.
They now face increasing competition from cellular IoT technologies such as NB-IoT that will operate in licensed spectrum.
