A low-cost proprietary network provider, which has a big name investor and will serve to efficiently feed M2M traffic onto LTE (News - Alert) networks, is set to be unveiled next month at CTIA.
That’s the word from Bryan M. Eagle III, vice president of business development and communication at Multi-Tech (News - Alert) Systems Inc., with whom TMCnet met this week at ITEXPO in Las Vegas.
While the new U.S. IoT network operator will not be a name we’ve heard before, it will have some interesting backers, Eagle said. When asked whether Google (News - Alert) might be one of those backers, Eagle responded: “Google would be a good name.”
This network is the U.S. analog to SIGFOX, an Intel-backed proprietary network using unlicensed frequencies in France to support connectivity for the Internet of Things, Eagle said. SIGFOX, which Eagle said uses technologies similar to Multi-Tech’s gateway product, is noteworthy in that it has brought the price of end device connectivity down to below $5 – or, in some cases, even below $1 a month or a year – for IoT. SIGFOX is being leveraged to provide connectivity for a wide range of use cases, including security systems, smoke alarms, bicycle tracking, and more.
The SIGFOX website quotes founder and CSO Christophe Fourtet saying: “For 20 years electronics manufacturers have had their eyes on mobile phones and the increase in capacity and flows. Based on the saying ‘Who can do more, can do less,’ they worked on improving cellular networks, from GSM to LTE, while thinking about their technologies with a view to developing low-cost and low-energy solutions. However, the resulting hybrid solutions cannot satisfy the major economic constraints of the IoT. The Ultra Narrow Band technology, somewhat forgotten, makes perfect sense when you’ve got a cloud to handle the volume and complexity, while keeping a simple, reliable and optimized protocol for the billions of objects awaiting this link.”
While SIGFOX offers 100-baud connection speeds, Eagle said that won’t fly in the U.S. because the Federal Communications Commission wouldn’t allow it. Eagle didn’t specify what speed or frequency the to-be-announced U.S. network provider would deliver or leverage.
Also at CTIA (News - Alert) next month, Multi-Tech Systems plans to unveil a new gateway product that is similar to the company’s existing OCG gateway (which uses Wi-Fi). But the new gateway has cellular and Ethernet backhaul, and on the front end uses various light wireless protocols for reach up to several miles.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson