What is SigFox?

Founded in France, SigFox is a LPWAN cellular connectivity that provides long-range coverage (approximately 30-50 km depending on interference levels and other environmental factors) at low data and power costs. As a result, it’s best suited for IoT and M2M devices that transmit small amounts of information such as sensors and actuators. 

It’s an ultra-narrowband connectivity similar to NB-IoT, which means that it sends and receives data using a narrower spectrum (around 125 khz or more) than other cellular connectivity types like LoRa and LoRaWAN. As a result, it carries less noise or interference than most of the competition which tend to have a wider spectrum.

A message-based radio network, SigFox data transmission functions as follows:

  1. An IoT device emits a lightweight message (12 bytes excluding payload headers) with its radio antenna.
  2. Nearby base stations receive the message and send it to the SigFox cloud.
  3. The cloud sends the message to the individual’s backend platform.

The SORACOM Air for SigFox IoT SIM card combines SigFox and GSM connectivity together on one platform and billing system. With this, businesses can leverage two cellular connectivity types while using Soracom’s wide range of cloud-host products including encryption offloading, on-demand remote access, private IoT networking and more.