Sometimes we get the question of why we don’t do the SimplePack with LoRa or NB-IoT.

There are 5 reasons for that:

• Focus


We believe that companies sometimes do products for all technologies but don’t understand that each technology has a specific place. These companies are also not able to leverage the unique advantages of each. We want to keep focus and concentrate on Sigfox. The radio technology that makes sense for the type of use cases we are targeting.

• Mass Scalability


In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we need to produce hundreds of thousands of devices and we need to distribute worldwide. Nor Semtech/LoRa nor NB-IoT has worldwide coverage as Sigfox does.

• Size


With the current needs of NB-IoT, we would need to enlarge the simplePack by a factor of four.

• Battery


With the energy profiles of LoRa and NB-IoT, the device longevity would be cut in half.

• Cost


The device with NB-IoT would have to cost three times bigger.

Despite all of that if anyone orders 50.000 NB-IoT buttons with us and is ready to pay, we can reconsider 🙂


But we don’t think it will ever happen.

For a nice presentation about each of the technology see Sigfox Webinar on LPWA landscape: Differences between Sigfox, LoRa, and NB-loT.