Silicon Valley To Get a Cellular Network Just For Things 42
An anonymous reader writes "MIT Technology Review reports that French company Sigfox will soon roll out a cellular data network in the San Francisco Bay Area aimed exclusively for low-bandwidth, low power devices such as household appliances and sensors. It's the U.S. debut for a technology already in use in France. The network uses the 900 MHz unlicensed spectrum used by cordless phones. Sigfox says that and their technology's very low bandwidth makes it possible to connect devices significantly more cheaply than with conventional cellular modems and service."
Re: PG&E (Score:2, Interesting)
To be fair, their system is a bit different. The main idea appears to be that they uses an ultra narrow band signal (fancy way of saying very low bit rate) to increase the range of a transmitter operating in the unlicensed ism band where power is limited to 100mW. They are claiming up to 40km. This means they can effectively set up a low cost network that doesn't need spectrum licenses.
The general principle is just a Shannon theorem trade off between bit rate and SNR in a power limited channel. For remote industrial sensing applications with very low data rate requirements this system could certainly be useful, though in the end I'm not sure why you would pay sigfox when it would be easy enough to roll your own. For household users this is probably of little use.