Sigfox expands proprietary IoT network to Colombia

French IoT networking company Sigfox has continued its Latin American expansion by making Colombia the third country in the region to receive its proprietary network.

Following the precedent established in Brazil and Mexico Sigfox has apparently created a dedicated operator from scratch, in this case Phaxsi Solutions, and named it the exclusive Sigfox operator for the country. Phaxsi has apparently been working with Sigfox since 2014 and has had a pilot going since last year. WND, another company apparently created by Sigfox, is helping out with the roll out.

“This is a very timely launch of SIGFOX’s network in Colombia on many levels,” said Carolina Campo, Phaxsi CEO and co-founder. “First, its light infrastructure enables Phaxsi to quickly and simply connect Colombian businesses and citizens to the IoT. Second, our goal is to work with the national alliance to sustainably develop, consolidate and grow the IoT market in Colombia. Finally, the arrival of this global connectivity solution opens the door to new economically competitive and energy-efficient services for Colombian businesses. These will deliver a significant, positive impact for the Colombian economy.”

“Colombia, our third nationwide deployment in Latin America this year, is clearly a key part of our mission to rapidly develop the IoT ecosystem in this region,” said Chris Bataillard, founder of WND. “We are eager to develop Colombia with Phaxsi, which has a strong strategic mix of radio experience and entrepreneurial spirit required to quickly deliver the many benefits of the IoT to the people of Colombia. And we see many application, hardware and ecosystem synergies across the region that already includes Colombia, Mexico and Brazil.”

Time is not on Sigfox’s side as there is growing momentum around NB-IoT, the LPWAN technology supported by the 3GPP as well as many telecoms giants and, unlike other LPWAN alternatives such as LoRa, Sigfox is entirely proprietary and doesn’t aim to benignly coexist with other technologies. With that in mind focusing on achieving critical mass in one region seems like a sensible strategy.

Elsewhere Taiwan Mobile is launching a suite of enterprise IoT services and its partnering with Cisco Jasper and its Control Center platform to serve up what it’s claiming is a complete plug-and-play IoT solution.

“Enterprises throughout Taiwan are eager to deliver new, value-added IoT services to their customers,” said Eddie Chan, Senior Director of Mobile Marketing and IoT Services Division at Taiwan Mobile. “Companies are increasingly focused on offering services that generate recurring revenue while improving the customer experience. Taiwan Mobile is excited to be at the forefront of enabling this transformation for businesses throughout Taiwan via the industry-leading Cisco Jasper IoT platform.”

“Taiwan Mobile and Cisco Jasper are both focused on supporting innovative enterprises to capitalize on IoT and capture their share of the connected service market,” said Hong Lu, Managing Director, North Asia at Cisco Jasper. “Taiwan Mobile’s partnership with Cisco Jasper shows its commitment to enabling enterprises to bring IoT services to market rapidly and cost-effectively, while also providing the capability to easily scale as business demands require.”

This move by Taiwan Mobile is part of a growing trend of companies actually delivering concrete IoT commercial opportunities after years of theorizing about how great it’s all going to be. While it might take the arrival of 5G before IoT really explodes, these early implementations will set important precedents when it comes to monetization and general best practice.