SigFox Installing a Cellular Network for the Internet of Things in San Francisco and #Silicon_Valley | MIT Technology Review
▻http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527376/silicon-valley-to-get-a-cellular-network-just-for-things
San Francisco is set to get a new cellular network later this year, but it won’t help fix the city’s spotty mobile-phone coverage. This wireless network is exclusively 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.
A SigFox base station can serve a radius of tens of kilometers in the countryside and five kilometers in urban areas. To connect to the network, a device will need a $1 or $2 wireless chip that’s compatible, and customers will pay about $1 in service charges per year per device.