The French company Sigfox is rolling out its mobile networks on the ultra-narrow band network (UNB technology) in Europe. Sigfox provides a cellular style network operator that provides a tailor-made solution for low-throughput Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. The market of IoT objects such as electricity meters, smart lamps, is in expansion and more and more manufacturers are investing in this market.
The sensors of these low-energy objects need to be continuously on and emits small amounts of data. Sigfox offers a UNB-network on the 868 MHZ frequency via an antenna in order to facilitate the IoT. The use of UNB is key to providing a scalable, high-capacity network, with very low energy consumption, while maintaining a simple and easy to rollout star-based cell infrastructure. The density of the cells in the SIGFOX network is based on an average range of about 30-50km in rural areas. Distances can be much higher for outdoor nodes where SIGFOX states line of sight messages could travel over 130 km.