Thinxtra's IoT covers 25% of A/NZ population

NSW-based Internet of Things (IoT) start-up Thinxtra has announced that its IoT network now covers 25% of the combined population of Australia and New Zealand.

Thinxtra has now deployed its public IoT network in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, covering a combined population of 9.6 million people.

The company plans to follow this up with a deployment in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, as well as a few regional towns which have specifically requested to be prioritised.

At the current rate of deployment, Thinxtra said it is on track to cover 85% of the population of the two nations within the next 14 months.

In addition, the company said that 25 companies have signed up to be ecosystem partners for the network, including Microsoft Azure, ThingWorx, NEC and New Zealand’s Kordia.

The company is building a partner ecosystem encompassing device makers, IoT platform providers, system integrators, universities and IoT consultants.

“These are clear signs that we are not just talking about doing it, we are making LPWAN a reality to connect things that were previously unconnected, thanks to the low-cost, low-power SIGFOX network, and demonstrating that our vision is shared with industry leaders,” Thinxtra CEO Loic Barancourt said.

“SIGFOX not only provides IoT connectivity, but does so under well-defined SLAs and built-in redundancy, in order to meet customers’ business standards.”

SIGFOX is a low-power wide area network (LP-WAN) networking standard tailored for IoT devices that need to continuously transmit small volumes of data. Due to the low volume requirements, LP-WAN delivers a significantly wider reach than conventional mobile communications networks.

Thinxtra separately announced plans to provide the first 50 selected local government councils with free SIGFOX coverage as part of a $5 million program to bring IoT services to councils across Australia.