Sigfox, whose eponymous protocol is one of the big four in low power WAN (LPWAN) markets, has partnered with Google’s hardware component developer Coral to strengthen its position in the fast-growing field of machine learning-based IoT edge processing. This will allow Sigfox to integrate a Coral chip – the Coral Edge TPU (tensor processing unit) ASIC – into IoT devices running its protocol to execute inferences locally. This is touted as reducing energy consumption, but the real benefit lies in being able to overcome the bandwidth limitations of LPWAN protocols, which has prevented powerful inferencing in computationally constrained IoT devices in the field. Many inferencing applications require a combination of rapid input/output and computational power that until, recently has only…