Nominal pricing for these units, meanwhile, has gone through the floor, and provisional longevity has gone through the roof. Sigfox has introduced a new category for dollar-range IoT devices, dubbed as U²LC (ultra-ultra low-cost). Both single-usage and reusable versions were to be available, it said a recycling scheme to counter e-waste was also in development.īetween times, lots has changed. At the time, Sigfox said the units would last three years, to match the shelf-life of pallets and weeks or months in certain ultra-budget cases, with enough power to issue “hundreds of messages”. On paper – proposed performance metrics for sub-dollar Sigfox ‘tracers’Ī second unnamed chip vendor, we were told, was in the wings, promising similarly-specified modules for $1-$1.50.

By late 2020, China-based chip firm CMOSTEK Microelectronics had commercialised them for pallet tracking in the supply chain and postal market, where Sigfox has decent contracts. A couple of years back, before Covid-19 cancelled the conference circuit, it distributed $1 ‘button’ prototypes, as panic buttons on keychains, to developers at its annual Sigfox Connect event in Singapore. The firm’s dogged pursuit of dirt-cheap IoT hardware is long-running. The claim extends, by some margin, its work so far to move the needle on tracker pricing closer to the magic dollar mark, plunging the race to the bottom on IoT costs (and to the top, in theory, on IoT volumes) into a new dimension. It suggests it can, on paper, get to this price using printed biodegradable batteries and other circuitry. Sigfox reckons it can get IoT hardware costs down to just 30 cents ($0.30) per unit, with battery life lasting up to 13 years. 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 show the bluest-sky thinking in the IoT space, and the theory to deliver ‘massive’ IoT via a race-to-the-bottom on hardware costs.

Note, in the week following publication of this article, Sigfox filed for bankruptcy.

Ultra low battery tracker chip