The Biggest Challenge Today is The “Lack of Hardware”
With the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), we are looking at an ecosystem filled with sensors geographically distributed over large areas. This calls for a wide-area network (WAN) bridged by low-power communication technologies. Paromik Chakraborty of Electronics For You spoke to Gaurav Sareen, country director-India, Sigfox, to understand benefits of low-power wide-area network technologies and how the Indian ecosystem is adapting to these.
Communication is a function of two things-transceiver and connectivity itself. Let’s take the simple example of your mobile service: First, you pay for the cost of the cell phone that has the transceiver embedded in the device, and then you pay for the connectivity to the network provider. New technologies are trying to address these cost points and bring them down.
To give you a clear idea, our transceiver costs just about 1/15th of a cell phone transceiver’s price. Typically, a cell phone transceiver costs $10-$12. Our transceivers cost $1.89. The cost of cellular networks today for M2M application is typically about $60 a year per device (about Rs 300 a month) as against Sigfox network’s about $3-$4 a year per device.
Going forward, as the cost of transceivers goes down further to a few cents, these sensors can be embedded in a larger variety of applications, and applications like the IoT and M2M will start becoming the mainstream.
Comments
Post a Comment