South Australia to become the country's first IoT state

If you’re impressed with recent reports of the cities of Brisbane and Launceston getting their own Internet of Things (IoT) networks, then the latest news out of South Australia could very well blow you away.

South Australia is set to become the first fully interconnected state in the Southern Hemisphere through a regional IoT network. The milestone comes courtesy of a memorandum of understanding between the South Australian Government and French IoT network provider Sigfox — which is currently rolling out its wireless network throughout Australia — with support from South Australia’s Investment Attraction agency.

The Sigfox network will be deployed by Sydney-based company Thinxtra, which has already made Adelaide a priority through the city’s established IoT and Smart City ecosystems. As explained by Renald Gallis, vice president for ecosystem and marketing at Thinxtra, “South Australia has been prioritised because they wanted the rollout now and investment attraction has provided free sites for us to use.

“We are setting up the stations at our cost [and] they’re providing free sites for us. I’d say it’s a 50/50 contribution.”

The network will be deployed not only in the metropolitan area, but throughout regional and rural South Australia as well, where it is expected to bring significant benefits to the state’s regional and rural farmers, schools, businesses and local government. It will be particularly useful to the $21 billion agriculture, food, wine and forestry export industry, with uses from irrigation control to tracking crop conditions.

“In the case of the agriculture industry, it can be used to track any kind of asset you have anywhere, so to track your cattle and see where they are, for example,” Gallis said.

“The big advantage of our IoT technology is that it’s very long range — the base station can be 20–50 km away in a regional area.”

Compared to other technology, IoT networks will also prove cheaper for the end user, with common devices like a tracker costing less than $30. The IoT network will also be more energy efficient, allowing devices to last longer, because it is purpose-built for low data transfer.

“It has 300 times less power consumption than 3G or Wi-Fi, so you can have very small devices with a very small battery that can last 10 to 20 years, depending on your application,” Gallis said.

“You can connect very cheap sensors, with very cheap connectivity — around $2 per year with devices like a tracker.”

Thinxtra CEO Loic Barancourt said the Sigfox network is now live in Adelaide and local device makers are already “gearing up to service major customers with Sigfox-ready IoT solutions”. The South Australian network is expected to be completed by June 2017, with a national rollout slated for the end of 2018.

This is a modified version of a news item published by The Lead South Australia under Creative Commons, with additional information from Thinxtra.

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