We've paused Sigfox roof aerial payments, says WND-UK, but we'll make you whole after COVID
- Reference: 1594369805
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/10/wnd_uk_sigfox_roof_aerials_spat/
- Source link:
Tim Harris, managing director of WND-UK, told The Register today that his firm had asked the people hosting its Sigfox antennas on their chimneys to “wait until we get through the pandemic” before asking for their £35/month.
Some alleged, to The Register and on Facebook, that the company had stopped paying them without notice.
“If they 100 per cent cannot support us and need the money now, we will pay them,” said Harris. “We’ll do a 50-50 so we don’t take it off the roof; if they can hang on but they don’t want the equipment turned on and want to make a gesture until they get paid, that’s fine as well.”
WND-UK runs Sigfox’s UK radio network. Sigfox is an Internet of Things connectivity tech that runs over unlicensed radio spectrum.
Intended for connectivity use cases requiring bytes of data sent at long intervals (say, tracking shipping containers or livestock) rather than kilobytes or megabytes as would be better supported by GSM or LTE mobile phone tech, WND-UK’s network consists of [1]dual-core Intel boxes hooked up to rooftop yagi (TV-style) aerials , as Harris's predecessor Neal Forse explained to The Register back in 2017 when it first launched.
Some of WND-UK’s aerial hosts had told us that the company had stopped paying them over the past few months, seemingly with little explanation as to why. One message highlighted, posted on Facebook by an irate aerial host, said:
[2]
Others commenting on WND-UK’s Facebook page said they had heard from the firm and had been promised to be paid once the pandemic had eased a bit, something its MD repeated to El Reg today.
Harris told us: “Who knew COVID was coming? Yeah, it has affected us. We’re in no danger of closing, we haven't laid anybody off, we’re keeping the team together and we’re fully intending to pay anyone who’s had missed payments. All we’re asking for is support.”
He mentioned that a funding round from WND-UK’s investors was paused as the entire world’s economy slammed the brakes on back in March when the true scale of the COVID-19 pandemic became clear. That funding round included a government grant that matches WND-UK’s funding on a 50-50 basis, he said, something Harris was optimistic would come through as planned once the UK business and investment world regains its confidence – allowing WND-UK to clear its debts to its aerial hosts.
“We’re delaying it and as soon as the tap is back on we’ll be spreading the payment over the rest of the period,” he repeated.
When we asked what WND-UK had told its aerial hosts about suspending payments, Harris was frank: “With hindsight, was it the right thing – should we have put a message out and said ‘Really sorry guys, we’ve got to delay payment’? Maybe, perhaps. Maybe we could have done something like that. We’re trying to get through [the pandemic] at the moment and that was the decision we took.”
Rather than paying the large sums demanded by traditional mobile network mast operators for integration onto their base station sites, WND-UK pays owners of chimneys £35 a month (or £105 a quarter) to strap an aerial and a signal processing box to it, with power being supplied from the host building.
The company now boasts 1,960 Sigfox aerial sites around the country and claims to have 91 per cent coverage of the nation’s population. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/07/19/wnd_uk_sigfox_95_pc_connectivity_uk_iot/
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/07/09/sigfox1.jpg
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: I don't get it £840k a year for something you could do over LTE
I might not understand this fully, but I suspect that in your solution everthing that you track has to have that connectivity, so paying your £20 + (12 x £5) = £80/year for each thing you want to track.
Whereas their system allows you them pay pennies for the trackers, but maintaining a relatively low amount of base stations to pick them up.
There are going to be a lot more things to track than stations to build the network, so they're betting on these economics working out.
Re: I don't get it £840k a year for something you could do over LTE
You know, there is low power and low power.
Or, so-called low-power and really low power.
Thus, it all depends what kind of energy source is available the thing (as in IoT).
If juice come from a battery nobody will change during the life span of captor, you need really low power (for which Sigfox is not the only existing option, but it is one, while LTE is not then).
Re: I don't get it £840k a year for something you could do over LTE
In the MoD we used to use something similar to this solution for tracking aircraft spares.
The lorry would drive past one of the antenna, and everything in the container would check itself in as arrived (at least that was the theory, sometimes the kit would be turned off, or a few bits wouldn't check in). Large/expensive items got a dedicated tag, smaller stuff may be put together into a container with it's own tag.
Using a LTE based solution for that just wouldn't scale financially. Whilst it's peanuts compared to the cost of a main rotor head, you don't really gain anything for the extra outlay, but get a "tag" that's bulkier and much more prone to damage.
This was a good few years ago though
Re: I don't get it £840k a year for something you could do over LTE
Must be fake news that the MoD uses this. After all Teresa may said "such systems do not yet exist".
https://www.brugesgroup.com/blog/electronic-customs-procedures-and-brexit
Re: I don't get it £840k a year for something you could do over LTE
Having used it, I'll tell you one thing for sure - if you want to try and use it for an electronic border, you really are on a hiding to nothing
I said we used it, not that it necessarily worked particularly well/reliably. I certainly wouldn't trust it to enforce border policy.
In a goods receiving context it's not too bad, because if something hasn't checked in you can get someone to go into the warehouse and physically check if there's an extra 1 in stock.
You can't do that with a border because it's going to end up god knows where, and the smugglers aren't going to put tags on in the first place (or will tag, but will declare it's something else).
Boris' electronic border suggestion is and was, complete bollocks, sorry. It only works where good faith is involved, and that's never the case at a border.
Where's the plug?
Maybe by not telling anyone, they were hoping people wouldn't notice, and not pull the plug on the antennas.
Re: Where's the plug?
Definitely. No other possible explanation, given the statement that it was a "decision".
Small claims court time by now, if they haven't contacted all the landlords and formally requested a payment holiday.
You don't get to arbitrarily take a payment holiday without asking.
Interest is of course already due.
Yagi?
Yagi antennas are directional — often very much so in the 868MHz band that Sigfox uses. I can't find any pictures of UK installations, but you'd definitely want something that's omnidirectional in the horizontal plane for a LPWAN base station. Maybe like those not-very-satisfactory TV antennas one finds on mobile homes.
The Race to the Bottom
So they have a technology which is based on using other people's resources (and ostensibly compensating them handsomely), and a licence-free chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Did anybody really think this was going to end any other way?
Re: The Race to the Bottom
Plus, their operation is clearly only financially sustainable when being supported by continual investor funding and government grants. They are going out of business, they just haven't realised it yet.
Revenue stream (or lack of it?)
When the company stops payments claiming Covid and investor reticence makes me think that there is no current revenue stream apart from investors throwing money at the company, and once that dries up, it’s time to sink or swim. If the basic infrastructure depends on people plugging it in and getting paid, once people pull the plug, that hits the usability of the network and starts a downward spiral to insolvency?
I don't get it £840k a year for something you could do over LTE
you can get a cheap mobile from amazon for under £20 & sim cards for under £5 a month with ~ 1GB of data usage.
why not coble up some solution that uses cheap lte components and form your own MVNE to support it?
i get that the iot things are to be low power etc etc, but LTE is low power too & if these things are on shipping crates and effectively beacon every so often & this system picks up that beacon, triangulates the position and stores it on a DB, for 2000 to get ~91+% of the nation i'm sure a phone mast would pick up the signal too as there are certainly more than 2000 of them.