BROWSING: Sensors

“We did what we said” – UnaBiz on six months of Sigfox, plus new funds, big plans

Singapore-based UnaBiz, owner of the Sigfox technology, has completed a Series B funding extension worth $25 million, to take its total Series B investment, initially pegged at $25 million in late 2021, to over $50 million. The new funding comes from existing investors, led...

Ericsson quits IoT – agrees sale of loss-making IoT Accelerator business to Aeris

Ericsson has agreed to sell its IoT business, including its IoT Accelerator connectivity management platform and Connected Vehicle Cloud platform, to California-based IoT provider Aeris. The Swedish firm said its IoT business, expected to post net sales of SEK 0.8 billion ($76.85 million) in...

Five days on the road – the journey of change for the supply chain (a truck-driving song)

There is an argument, gathering popularity, that the IoT market has grown up; that IoT just works, well enough, at last – so that technology is no longer the start-point for a conversation with industry about digital change. Instead, a linear narrative can now...

Celona on CBRS-bashing by old telco crowd – plus global expansion, growth verticals

Last month, the CBRS community in the US made a swift counter-strike, in the form of a joint letter to the FCC and NTIA, against a report by telecoms lobby group CTIA that said private and shared cellular is bad for the US economy...

Big game hunting with private 5G – more takeaways from Private Networks Forum

A panel session at Private Networks European Forum last month put the spotlight on the discipline of network and system management, specifically, where traditional mobile operators are increasingly facing-off with rival factions in the developing Industry 4.0 supplier market. These other groups include system...

Siemens and Qualcomm test indoor private 5G in CBRS for building automation

Siemens has worked with Qualcomm to deploy an indoor private 5G network in CBRS spectrum at Siemens headquarters in Chicago, with a view to test and develop solutions to automate building functions and services. The private 5G trial network is being used, initially to...

Terminal operator STI appoints Nokia to deploy private LTE at Chile’s biggest port

Nokia is to deploy a private LTE network at the Port of San Antonio in Chile, the country’s main maritime port, handling almost 50 percent of the country’s import and export trade. The Finnish vendor was selected by the port operator, San Antonio Terminal...

Australian supermarket chain Coles deploys Sigfox tracking for poultry supply chain

Australian supermarket chain Coles is running track-and-trace of its poultry supply chain, based on an IoT tracking and monitoring solution by pallet pooling company Loscam and local Sigfox operator Thinxtra. The pair has attached sensors to 4,500 poultry ‘bins’ (containers) moving between its suppliers’...

‘Don’t talk tech just because you don’t get the vertical’ – the hardest industry of all

There was a good panel session, yesterday (November 29; see cover image, available on-demand), on IoT tracking in the supply chain, which brought insightful content and commentary from leading IoT outfits DeltaTrak, Telit, and Unabiz, plus from analyst house ABI Research. But even with...

Keg tracking with Konvoy – how the beer industry got buzzed on IoT

Australian outfit Konvoy Group started three years ago, in the summer of 2019, as a keg rental business, offering logistics support to craft brewers in its home country. It has, in the meantime, expanded its services portfolio, launched in international markets, and signed with...

Transatel on the “ultimate” public/private 5G mashup for Industry 4.0 (an MVNO story)

France-based virtual operator Transatel, busily offering somehow-unfashionable local MVNO and MVNE services in Europe for two decades already, has a second (actually, third and fourth) life, suddenly, in the global IoT game – which has become even racier in recent years with its acquisition...

Smart electricity meter penetration in EU reaches 56% at end-2022

At the end of 2021, the EU + UK region had nearly 163 million smart electricity meters   More than 56% of the electricity customers in European Union and the United Kingdom (the so-called EU27+3) had a smart meter at the end of 2022, according to...

Wireless Logic buys French IoT platform provider IoThink Solutions

UK IoT connectivity platform provider Wireless Logic has acquired France-based industrial IoT platform enabler IoThink Solutions for an undisclosed sum. The deal follows Wireless Logic’s twin purchases of IoT MVNO Mobius Networks and IoT SIM provider Jola in the summer. The Berkshire-based firm also...

Sony preps “first” LTE-M/NB-IoT chipset – as “most advanced” cellular IoT solution

Sony Semiconductor Israel has introduced a new dual-band low-power cellular IoT chipset solution which it claims is the “first” to combine the both LTE-M and NB-IoT in a single integrated modem. The new ALT1350 chipset also supports satellite (non-terrestrial; NTN) connectivity, plus cellular, satellite-GNSS,...

Soracom claims five million IoT connections (a million in 2022), applies to list on TSE

KDDI-owned IoT connectivity provider Soracom has claimed its five-millionth IoT connection, citing strong uptake in the energy, retail, healthcare, agriculture, and consumer electronics industries. The figure represents an advance of one million global connections in less than a year; the firm passed four million,...

Spectrum, systems, slicing – five key challenges to bring private 5G to the masses

A session at Private Networks European Forum (PNEF) last month considered the challenges, and broader cultural shift, to bring ‘private 5G to the masses’. Koen Mioulet, secretary at the European Users Wireless Enterprise Network Association (EUWENA), and Maria Cuevas, networks research director at UK-based...

‘America’s inventive spirit at its finest’ – CBRS model must be extended, says industry

Twenty-six organizations and alliances in the US with active interests in private and shared cellular for enterprise usage have jointly written to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to hail the “success” of the Citizens Broadband Radio...

Skyworks, Sequans combine on “smallest” LTE-M and NB-IoT system-in-package

Semiconductor firm Skyworks Solutions claims to have produced the world’s smallest dual-mode cellular IoT system-in-package (SiP) solution. The US outfit partnered with IoT chip and module maker Sequans Communications on the product, numbered SKY66431, to combine the France-based firm’s Monarch 2 modem with its...

Federated Wireless and AWS kick off private 5G channel deal with Cal Poly installation

Federated Wireless is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a private cellular deployment with California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) to support the university’s new ‘5G innovation network’, geared to “accelerate” adoption of edge and cloud IoT networking and AI analytics for public...

A message to enterprises about private 5G* in manufacturing – just do it

Note, this article is taken from the intro/outro sessions at 5G Manufacturing Forum, hosted by Enterprise IoT Insights and RCR Wireless. It is a summary, a ramble, and a call-to-arms – which attempts only to say that industrial 5G is a developing standard, which...

BT-led consortium secures financing for infrastructure drone project

BT noted that the project will demonstrate value in three use case areas for ports and highways, including port operations and management, marine operations and highway safety and defect inspections U.K. carrier BT said that the government committed to provide financing for a project in...

Betacom strikes deal with Qualcomm on private LTE/5G design and management

Network design and services firm Betacom has struck a channel sales deal (“integrated delivery model”) with Qualcomm whereby enterprise customers in the Industry 4.0 space will be able to link Betacom’s private 5G network design and management service with Qualcomm’s RAN automation and management...

Ignion intros digital-twin prototyping for IoT devices with up to five radios

Barcelona-based antenna company Ignion has launched a digital-twin prototyping tool for IoT devices with up to five radios. The latest version of its Antenna Intelligence Cloud (AIC) product, which ostensibly removes the need to start with a physical prototype, supports design simulations of IoT...

Supply chain scale-up project44 bags $80m from Maersk, others – takes value to $2.7bn

A sure sign of spiralling interest in asset tracking; US supply-chain software outfit project44 has raised an $80 million funding round led by UK-based investment company Generation Investment Management and Denmark-based A.P. Moller Holding, the investment arm of A.P. Moller Maersk, and parent of...