Dish, a Denver based IoT startup announced its acquisition of Parkifi, a provider of IoT based parking solutions at an undisclosed price. ParkiFi itself had raked in $13.9M in funding with the latest round of a $9.5M Series A funding in February last year. Dish network looks ahead to jump into the world of IoT with the buyout of Parkifi. Founded in 2014, Parkifi will continue the operations by retaining its brand name after becoming part of Dish.
Dish has been planning to move into the Internet of Things and began buying up spectrum at government auctions in 2008. In April last year, the company won $6.2 billion worth of 600 MHz licenses. Currently, the company has $11 billion worth of wireless spectrum and plans to deepen its connection to the IoT and wireless worlds with the ParkiFi acquisition.
Earlier in 2017, Dish also announced building a national IoT narrowband network to let devices such as parking sensors, smart street lights, and gas meters communicate with operators more efficiently. As part of its product development, the company plans to leverage the expertise of Parkifi to test and learn as they deploy their own network is that expected to be completed by 2020.
ParkiFi provides spot-level parking data from lots, garages, and on-street parking.
“Parkifi brings to DISH practical deployment and real-world experience connecting low-powered sensors with gateways to the cloud.”
Tom Cullen, DISH executive vice president of Corporate Development.
Dish is not the only company to create narrowband IoT network. T-Mobile was the first wireless company in North America to launch NB-IoT last October. Verizon also has an M2M plan called LTE Cat-M over its narrowband network.
