To celebrate the first year of its cellular low-bandwidth network dedicated to Machine to Machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things (IoT), SIGFOX welcomed some 150 recognized stakeholders in the community from 10 countries, on Wednesday, June 5, 2013. During this event, the operator announced the expansion of its network to Russia and the Netherlands.

SIGFOX's international deployment starts with Russia and the Netherlands

At this event, SIGFOX publicized the signature of two SNO (Sigfox Network Operator) contracts, consequently expanding its network beyond France, specifically to Russia and the Netherlands.

AEREA, the company responsible for deploying the network in the Netherlands, stated that the country will enjoy total coverage by late 2013. Deployment in Russia begins this year with coverage of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, representing 70% of the country's population.

These first agreements augur well for SIGFOX CEO Ludovic Le Moan's international goals.

He targets the coverage of 60 countries within 5 years through partnerships.

A year ago, gathering silicon vendors, infrastructure operators and industrialists in the same place to share and discuss their vision of the future man/object relationship would have been impossible. But today, the prominent place that the Internet of Things occupies unites all of the players in the value chain on the cusp of tomorrow's Internet.

The Internet of Things provides the opportunity to connect our world's stimuli to the millions of processors which form the Internet, thus providing direction, anticipating the future and improving everyone's lives.

According to Machina Research, which assessed the IoT's state-of-the-art for this event, "90% of the objects that will link-up via the Web have frugal connectivity needs."

The SIGFOX birthday event focused on four round tables with representatives for the occasion coming from the United States, China, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Israel, Ireland and Spain.

The first roundtable concerned silicon vendors, with a panel of executives from Silicon Labs, Intel, Semtech, ATMEL, Energy Micro and CEA-LETI. These major players, who provide electronic components which transmit the data digitized by the sensors via radio waves, concurred on the issues of cost and consumption required to give the Internet of Things its full potential.

At the round table of infrastructure operators, TDF conveyed its enthusiasm for the collaboration with SIGFOX to deploy its network in France. A speaker representing Deutsche Telekom stressed that the Internet of Things can develop on a large scale through a network complementary to GSM and similar to that implemented by SIGFOX. Furthermore, EADS Astrium highlighted the immense potential of UNB (Ultra Narrow Band), the SIGFOX solution's underlying technology, linked to a constellation of satellites.

Together, SIGFOX and Astrium plan to launch a disruptive offer to cover the oceans, deserts and countries not equipped with ground antennas.

Two other round tables presented consumer and industrial uses of the Internet of Things and the SIGFOX network in the presence of representatives from Schneider, Hager, Xerox, SEB, Traqueur, Polier Water, Covéa, World Sensing Net China, Digital Enterprise Greenwich and Living PlanIT. They agreed that in the future each of their industries could benefit from the SIGFOX network to propose competitive offers and new uses, limited only by human imagination.

The day's discussions helped to depict a full panorama of the IoT's industrial potential in the health, automotive, environment, industry and energy sectors. In addition, participants stressed that IoT can unify other revolutions and trends promoted by Big Data (providing a common core for heterogeneous data), MEMS and other sensors which will exchange data via the Internet in the future.

For Stéphane Nègre, CEO of Intel France, "the network's cost is not a value in itself, since all that matters is what it can connect. Taking into account the outstanding economic performance of the SIGFOX network, which combines extremely low cost and the ability to connect billions of objects, essentially this means that SIGFOX will release significant value inherent in applications".

About SIGFOX
SIGFOX is the first and only cellular network operator dedicated to low bandwidth communications for connected objects. Thanks to its patented UNB technology, SIGFOX is revolutionizing the world of M2M and IoT, thus enabling the large-scale connection of objects. The network already connects tens of thousands of objects in France and certain large international cities to the Internet and its customers' information systems. SIGFOX brings to the Internet of Things what Apple brought to mobile applications: on the one hand, the facility to create and connect objects to the Internet and on the other the creation of mobile applications and their diffusion. Alternatively, SIGFOX contributes to wireless communication networks what Twitter contributes to Web communications, i.e., the ability to communicate the essentials at low cost.
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