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Ultra-cheap, long-life, green-by-design – Sigfox teases biodegradable IoT at $0.30

Note, in the week following publication of this article, Sigfox filed for bankruptcy. Coverage of receivership procedings against Sigfox can be found here; read on to hear about the kind of big ideas that, perhaps, undermined Sigfox in the end – but which also...

Semtech, Lacuna Space redouble satellite IoT efforts to extend LoRa to whole planet

Satellite IoT is everywhere, suddenly. Further to Inmarsat’s L-band satellite IoT solution with energy firm RWE in the UK, and LoRaWAN outfit Senet’s arrangement on satellite IoT tracking with Eutelsat yesterday (January 12), California-based chip maker Semtech Corporation has announced a further initiative with...

Senet and Eutelsat combine on “first and only true-global” LoRaWAN IoT network

US LoRaWAN network operator and cloud provider Senet has partnered with European satellite operator Eutelsat Communications, together with US-based LoRaWAN and GPS tracking solutions provider TrakAssure, and UK-based LoraWAN (and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi mesh) network provider Wyld Networks to integrate terrestrial and satellite LoRaWAN...

Three ways IoT can help save our climate (Reader Forum)

Mankind needs change and fast. The best-case scenarios from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) require aggressive mitigation of global carbon emissions, calling for them to fall to levels from 40 to 70% lower than their 2010 levels. As the climate crisis...

Technology trends for a smarter, sustainable planet (Semtech on 2022)

There is an increasing requirement for sensing and monitoring technologies to support a more sustainable world. With resources in increasingly short supply, monitoring the use of those resources becomes even more important, whether they’re water, electricity, minerals or crops, to enable the most efficient...

Updates from LoRa-land – air-quality installs in urban forests, wildfire hotspots, buildings

Various updates from LoRa-land, and beyond... Semtech, the owner of LoRa tech and licensing, said environmental IoT provider ICT International, is using LoRa-based devices on LoRaWAN networks to improve urban forest management and carbon accounting. ICT International’s “plant physiology devices” are able to monitor...

Viasat buys Inmarsat for $7.3bn to forge global satellite broadband and IoT network

US satellite broadband provider Viasat has agreed a deal to acquire UK-based counterpart Inmarsat for $7.3 billion. The combined company will integrate their spectrum, satellite, and terrestrial assets as a “global high-capacity hybrid space and terrestrial network”, the pair said. It will focus on...

Scotland starts private 5G rollout in bid to add £17bn GDP and 160,000 jobs

The Scotland 5G Centre, a government-sponsored research centre with the universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow, has opened a private 5G network testbed in Dumfries in the south of Scotland, to be followed by a second private 5G showcase before the year is out in...

Morse Micro confirms Wi-Fi certification of HaLow chips, modules, reference designs

Semiconductor company Morse Micro, developing Wi-Fi HaLow for low-power mid-range IoT connectivity, has confirmed its various chipsets, modules, and reference designs have been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance as part of its new Wi-Fi HaLow accreditation scheme. Its new Wi-Fi HaLow reference design is...

Investment in industrial IoT to trump cloud, security, analytics in next three years

New research from UK satellite company Inmarsat says IoT is set to overtake cloud computing as the primary Industry 4.0 technology, with enterprise IT investments in industrial IoT to trump everything else in the next three years, including next generation security, big data analytics,...

Hiber signs up to use Inmarsat’s ELERA satellite system for hard-to-reach IoT

Busy Dutch industrial IoT scale-up Hiber has announced it will use Inmarsat’s new ELERA satellite IoT network to expand its own low-power wide-area (LPWA) IoT network, which goes under the name Hiberband. The deal allows Hiber, founded in 2016, to “gain years in satellite...

Satellite IoT market to hit 15.7m connections in 2025, growing 35.8% per year

The number of satellite IoT subscribers will increase at a compound rate of 35.8 percent per year to reach 15.7 million in 2025, from around 3.4 million in 2020. Analyst firm Berg Insight, with a new research report, said the market for satellite IoT...

Ingenu to launch 72 LEO satellites into space – to build ‘largest space IIoT network’

IoT connectivity company Ingenu has announced a plan to launch 72 satellites into space to support low-power machine communications for the smart energy, manufacturing, agriculture, cities, logistics, oil and gas, and mining sectors. The San Diego firm has struck a deal with Arizona-based Phantom...

Massive IoT starts to come online as NB-IoT roaming and billing get sorted, says BICS

International cellular provider BICS has said it has NB-IoT roaming coverage in a dozen countries, with new NB-IoT deals being signed at a faster rate than on LTE-M, and a loose target of “more than 20” NB-IoT roaming contracts by the year-end. The Belgium-based...

A rock and a hard place – how NB-IoT finally escaped the long shadow of 5G (and 2G)

Massive IoT? What a joke. Except no one in the business of massive IoT is laughing, because no one has given up on it. And because everyone is too busy trying to make it work. For the cellular industry, that means getting NB-IoT (and,...

Senet agrees US roaming with blockchain-based LoRaWAN provider Helium

LoRaWAN operator Senet has agreed a US-based roaming deal with peer-to-peer LoRaWAN operator Helium. The deal follows its announcement last week it is offering integration services with third-party LoRaWAN networks, alongside wholesale LoRaWAN plans for US cellular operators. Hotspot maker Helium, which runs its so-called...

Qualcomm joins chorus for faster 5G rollout, citing major ‘green’ benefits (and big bucks)

The clamour from the telecoms industry for governments and regulators to ease and encourage further 5G rollout is getting louder. Following on the heels of Vodafone’s call-to-arms last week in the UK, for the government to write targets and incentives for 5G and IoT...

Microsoft joins LoRa Alliance board, labels LoRaWAN ‘critical fabric’ for digital twins

Microsoft has joined the board of the LoRa Alliance, the marketing and development body for the LoRaWAN  low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) standard. Microsoft said LoRaWAN was a “critical connectivity fabric” for its work with digital twins, listing a bunch of customers that have used...

Vodafone urges UK to bundle 5G and IoT targets and incentives into net zero strategy

Vodafone has urged the UK government to write targets and incentives for 5G and IoT adoption into its forthcoming net-zero strategy blueprints, due to be published later this year. The UK-headquartered operator said the UK government should create a regulatory and policy framework that...

Microsoft and Nokia bundle ‘space tech’ and 5G to spur Australian industry

Microsoft and Nokia have partnered with the South Australian Government to combine ‘space technology’ and terrestrial 5G in service of local industry, including as the basis for digital change in the Australian agriculture, mining, transport, logistics, and public sector industries. A press statement provided little...

Telia joins with Swedish tech consortium to put 5G farming robot through its paces

Operator Telia is working with a consortium of Swedish research and tech companies to test the effectiveness of cellular 5G to connect and control robots in the farming industry. The group has connected an autonomous robot, programmed for weed control in a farming environment,...

TIM signs €225m IoT development deal to capture 5% of global IoT services market

TIM has struck a deal via its IoT solutions division Olivetti with engineering firm SECO to produce IoT solutions for Italian enterprises – worth €50m to SECO and €225m to TIM over the next three years.

Inmarsat preps narrowband IoT satellite network and satellite-5G combi service

UK satellite communications provider Inmarsat is to launch a global narrowband network for IoT connectivity, targeting the aviation, maritime, and government sectors. The new service, which goes by the name ELERA, and launches in trial mode with aviation customers in 2022, uses L-band spectrum...

Nokia to scale-up drone-mounted 5G-powered machine-vision farming solution

US farming company AeroFarms has recruited Nokia on a multi-year deal to supply private 5G, computer vision, machine learning, and autonomous drones. The pair are testing the technologies with current crop varieties, as part of an autonomous drone-mounted machine vision application connecting between a...