Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) have become popular in the past few years due to their extended coverage and low power consumption. This led to the development of interesting applications such as smart cities, smart agriculture, and asset tracking and monitoring. Sigfox is a popular LPWAN technology widely deployed worldwide. In the Sigfox architecture, Sigfox gateways or base stations play a key role. These act as an intermediary in the network architecture, to forward any messages acquired from the end devices. In this article, an overview of Sigfox and an introduction to what a Sigfox gateway is will be provided. It will also discuss when to use a Sigfox gateway and provide guidance on how to choose a good Sigfox gateway for a certain design or application. What is Sigfox? Sigfox is a popular LPWAN technology designed to address IoT and Machine to Machine (M2M) requirements. It inherits the key features of

With the advancement of information technology, the requirement for enabling wireless communication has become an important factor in realizing modern applications. Connected networks of machines and devices communicating with each other in Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications require wireless communication techniques as these devices are widely spread over a large geographical area. Furthermore, these devices would be battery powered meaning they require low power-consuming communication technologies which are also capable of communicating over a large range of distances. As a result of these requirements, we see increasingly communication technologies competing such as LoRa, Sigfox and NB-IoT etc. This article will discuss what is Sigfox and its applications and significance.   What is Sigfox? Sigfox is a narrowband LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) protocol developed in 2009 in France. This protocol is widely used in IoT when the volume data is low and the operating range is large (more than tens of km). Sigfox uses