Is Sigfox the Uber of the IoT?

[Nick Hunn on LinkedIn ]

Sigfox started life because the mobile network operators took their eye off the ball. Despite the fact that the operators were gung-ho about the opportunities from the Internet of Things, they were rapidly refarming their 2G spectrum which supported GPRS – the cellular service which has been the workhorse for M2M applications and the potential service for the early years of the IoT, leaving their customers with no viable solution. They’d become so obsessed with the data requirements of a new generation of smartphone users and the voracious data appetite of mobile video, that they’d forgotten to design a replacement. Instead, they assumed that IoT users could stomach the additional cost and power consumption of 4G modems. That was so fallacious, it makes you wonder whether they actually understood what the IoT is.