Silicon Valley to Get a Cellular Network, Just for Things

05-22-2014 • http://www.technologyreview.com, By Tom Simonite

San Francisco is set to get a new cellular network later this year, but it won’t help fix the city’s spotty mobile-phone coverage. This wireless network is exclusively for things. The French company SigFox says it picked the Bay Area to demonstrate a wireless network intended to make it cheap and practical to link anything to the Internet, from smoke detectors to dog collars, bicycle locks, and water pipes. Regular mobile networks are jammed with traffic from phone calls and people downloading videos. But for the Internet of things to become a reality, similar capabilities will need to be extended to billions of objects, many of them embedded in the environment and powered by small batteries. “If you want to get to billions of connections like that, you require a completely new type of network,” says Luke D’Arcy, director of SigFox’s operations in the U.S.