Sigfox network coverage in Poland

What is Sigfox?

Sigfox is a radio technology operating on ISM radio bands (868MHz in Europe, 915MHz in the US). That means no licenses needed to use this solution.
The technology uses Ultra Narrow Band technology to transfer data from device to network. End devices, like nodes or sensors, are designed by network’s users. However, gateways or infrastructure, in general, is operated by Sigfox. Therefore, Sigfox is operating similar to GSM providers.

.@Sigfox is now available in Poland! 🇵🇱🎉
All Europe 🇪🇺 is now fully-covered by our #0GNetwork 📡 #WeMakeThingsComeAlive pic.twitter.com/1OrZHYO1Xh

— Sigfox (@sigfox) 18 stycznia 2019

Why use it?

Firstly – the costs. We can simply decrease the money needed for the design. The whole infrastructure is out there and ready to use.
In this case, there is no need to establish the gateway (like with LoRaWAN) or custom proprietary protocols. The downside of such an approach is a service fee for using the Sigfox network. But is a 1.5 EUR /device/month really too much?
The network provides all services required to receive messages from the devices and pass them to the backend servers over the Internet. It has some limitations though, especially in terms of bandwidth. You can send up to 140 messages per 24h, each up to 12 bytes. Is it too small? Well, it’s almost 1 message every 10 minutes.
It’s enough for activities like data logging or monitoring events without high dynamic. For example, the temperature reading is only 2 bytes, GPS location is only 6 bytes.