SigFox is a French radio frequency technology allowing a really low cost data transfer from Machine to Machine. Compared to GSM, this solution have some great advantages : it costs only 10-16€ per year and the energy consumption is about 1000 time less. For sure there is some constraint and the main one is the quantity of information you can transmit. In fact you have a limit of 150 sent messages / days with a length of 12Bytes. It’s not big but is it enough for a lot of IoT and M2M applications.
This technology works as a modem you can connect to any platform like Arduino, RaspberryPi. The chips are provided by TelecomDesign from a cost about 15€. The starter kit is about 150€ here.
The great advantage of this technology, in a operator point of view is the low density of the architecture where you need only 1000 antennas to cover a territory like France. As a consequence, at this time, already 90% of the country is covered by this technology.
