Cusp of the IoT with Sigfox

Posted by
Sandra Mueller

Cusp of the IoT with Sigfox

On this week’s episode of the Real World IoT Podcast, host Ken Briodagh discusses where we are seeing growth in the IoT industry with President at Sigfox, Christian Olivier. Christian has been in the technology industry for a number of years, joining Sigfox USA in 2017. Sigfox is a worldwide provider of connectivity for the Internet of Things. The company has built a global network to connect billions of devices to the Internet. With Sigfox's unique device-to-cloud approach, they have been able to overcome some of the biggest barriers in global IoT adoption: cost, energy consumption, and global scalability.

Realistic Expectations

Numbers and forecasts on the future of the IoT are rampant across the board. We see reports coming out constantly, introducing figures on how many new connected devices there will be by a certain year in the future. Ken doesn't see this as a very realistic representation about how the IoT industry is performing, and in talking to Christian he somewhat agrees. Every customer has a different set of needs, so a better representation would be the number of use cases and the average size of those use cases. Using this information there has been quite a growth and, according to Christian, we see a lot of that growth due to the ROI that many of these solutions are meant to provide. Not everything in the IoT is perfect, but those solutions that work provide a significant return, and that's where we see people jumping on the opportunity.

Keeping People Interested

The IoT has been notoriously slow in comparison to what people predicted the growth would end up being for the industry. There were high hopes and high expectations for the things coming out of the IoT and while there are so many solutions that are benefiting the world around us, it doesn't seem to excite as much as it used to in theory. For example, smart cities were all the rage and seemed like the cool new up and coming thing that the IoT would provide to better peoples lives and improve efficiency. With a very slow start in the US especially, we haven't seen that excitement for the things the IoT can provide outside of the heavy industrial benefits that it provides. This is a tough place to be stuck because there are benefits through either application, we just see them fall more heavily in the manufacturing or industrial side where many people won't even realize they exist. With smart cities in particular, this is a great application to get people interested because of the amazing benefits and cool technology that can come out of it, but also because of the problems that ensue. We have seen slow growth, but the nice thing is that cities all seem to have the same issues, which means once there are a few cities that have paved the way, others can more easily follow.

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