Sigfox refused to die

Along with LoRaWAN, Sigfox is the other "original" IoT radio technology. In the spring of last year, the whole story was about to end when Sigfox SA, the original parent company who developed the technology, went bankrupt. In the auction, all the assets ended up in the ownership of Singaporean UnaBiz. Under its management, the operation has recovered and now Sigfox seems to be fulfilling the promises made to the technology.

Sigfox operates on free ISM frequencies and is in many ways a superior IoT technology. Then how could it be that the company that developed the technology failed in practice, even though it collected a large pot of money from the market? According to UnaBiz CEO Henri Bong, it was a matter of many factors: the timing, the business model, the signed operator contracts, actually the whole hype around IoT. In the end, the reason seems to be the ego of the Sigfox management.

- I told Sigfox's management in 2016 that the price of the connection is too low. Still, the entire IoT business was developed with the hope that there would be a billion subscriptions in 2020. The reality was something between 100200 million devices. You could say that the IoT failed all expectations.

According to Bong, an IoT business cannot be founded on hardware alone, i.e. devices. Actually, network technology doesn't matter. Every existing Sigfox