Sigfox makes global stride with Altice IoT partnership

IoT networking platform Sigfox has gained the endorsement of international telecoms conglomerate Altice as, alongside subsidiary SFR, the two have agreed rollouts in France and across the world.

Sigfox has developed significant momentum over the past 18 months in a variety of European countries, and the announcement has seen it add France’s second biggest operator in SFR to its ranks.  Altice, SFR’s parent company, also owns Portugal Telecom and Americas-based cable operator Cablevision, and it has confirmed plans to extend the Sigfox agreement to all territories where the group is present, including Portugal, the US and Israel.

Former Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes, now COO at Altice and CEO of SFR, said the agreement will see its Sigfox-enabled networks carry billions of connections around the world.

“We are convinced that the IoT market is an opportunity to seize now, with a global vision,” he said. “We are talking about billions of connections. We share the same entrepreneurial vision with Sigfox and the will to conquer new markets. The availability of the Sigfox network allows us to bring new Internet of Things solutions to our B2B clients.”

Sigfox runs as parallel to operator’s cellular networks, and is designed to be ready for extremely low-power IoT products.

In other Sigfox-related IoT news, infrastructure vendor Arqiva has announced that M2M/Iot managed services reseller Wireless Logic is going to be the first company in the UK to utilise the capabilities of its Sigfox-powered IoT network. Director of Smart and M2M at Arqiva, Sean Weir, said Sigfox is the go-to protocol for low-powered IoT connectivity.

“The Internet of Things holds vast potential for businesses looking to leverage the benefits hyper-connectivity has to offer, and we’re looking forward to seeing the market go from strength to strength,” he said. “What we’ve seen so far however is that IoT clearly needs a far-reaching, low power wide area network to operate across to make this happen.”

Finally, Cisco has confirmed the completion of the $1.4bn Jasper deal it announced in February, bolstering its IoT portfolio. With it, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins distributed a staff e-mail to confirm the restructuring of its networking business to create a new dedicated IoT arm, into which the Jasper team will integrate.

“Today we are making changes to how we organise Engineering to better reflect our strategic priorities and align around four key areas: Networking and Market Segments, Cloud Services and Platforms, IoT and Applications, and Security,” Robbins said in a company-wide e-mail leaked to Business Insider.