philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Silicon Valley to Get a Cellular Network, Just for Things

The French company SigFox says it picked the Bay Area to demonstrate a wireless network intended to make it cheap and practical to link anything to the Internet, from smoke detectors to dog collars, bicycle locks, and water pipes.

Regular mobile networks are jammed with traffic from phone calls and people downloading videos. But for the Internet of things to become a reality, similar capabilities will need to be extended to billions of objects, many of them embedded in the environment and powered by small batteries. “If you want to get to billions of connections like that, you require a completely new type of network,” says Luke D’Arcy, director of SigFox’s operations in the U.S.

The Silicon Valley network will use the unlicensed 915-megahertz spectrum band commonly used by cordless phones. Objects connected to SigFox’s network can operate at very low power but will be able to transmit at only 100 bits per second—slower by a factor of 1,000 than the networks that serve smartphones. But that could be enough for many applications.

By reaching into the Bay Area first (with expansion to tech hubs such as Austin, Cambridge, and Boulder in its sights), SigFox hopes to catch the interest of a region where venture capitalists poured nearly $1 billion into startup companies focusing on the Internet of things last year, according to the research firm CB Insights. One of those startups, Whistle, makes a fitness-tracking collar for dogs. It has raised $6 million and is located in a corner of San Francisco that’s been called “IoT Town” thanks to its profusion of similar ventures.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527376/silicon-valley-to-get-a-cellular-network-just-for-things/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140528