Cities can benefit from smart street lamps in numerous ways, including lower electricity costs, increased public safety, better traffic flow, and better environmental monitoring. The creation of a smart city is being recognized by local authorities, according to Ryan Citron, the Senior Research Analyst at Navigant Research.
Most crucially, perhaps, good public lighting lowers costs. Currently, street lighting makes up 40% of the electricity used in a typical metropolis. The research from Navigant Research shows that LEDs can cut the energy use of streetlights by up to 50%. Cities may modify the color, intensity, and direction of lighting by using smart LED lights.
“While LED lights have gained widespread acceptance for use in street lighting, this only addresses half of the issue. Cities can reduce the payback period by a few years by adopting networked, adaptive street lighting solutions, according to Abhay Bhargava, Director of Industrial Practice — MEA at Frost & Sullivan, who cited the study “Global Connected Street Lighting and Smart Lamp Poles Market, Forecast to 2024.”
However, networked street lighting is capable of much more than merely illuminating people’s lives at night. Additionally, it has the ability to relay a variety of data kinds to the city’s centralized command center. For example, when a light bulb is faulty, networked streetlights can provide notifications. Without this technology, towns would have to send out nighttime patrols to look for broken lights or wait until a member of the public reported one.
According to Ryan Citron of Navigant, “Smart street lighting considerably lowers maintenance costs since lighting failures are automatically identified, decreasing the time, expense, and energy needed to locate and restore burned-out lamps and other defects.”
According to Frost & Sullivan, smart streetlights can provide city governments with a number of advantages, such as increased operational and energy savings, improved citizen experiences, facilitated the adoption of smart city initiatives, and operational efficiency through remote management.
Two popular network options: IEEE or 3GPP
For smart street lamps, a communications infrastructure is needed. There are two common network options: IEEE or 3GPP. Zigbee mesh, LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE wireless solutions, and power-line communication are available options (PLC).
Chintan Shah, the founder, and CEO of Tvilight, a Dutch manufacturer of smart lighting solutions, said that cities could choose the best communication solution depending on their unique local environment and needs.
Two choices, according to Shah, are becoming more popular. Devices can build their own broadband wireless mesh network using IEEE 802.15.4 open standards-based wireless communication, such as 2.4 GHz Zigbee mesh, which is ideal for both outdoor and tunnel-like situations. Additionally, it creates a safe network that can be utilized internationally without certain licensing permissions.
Instead, the 3GPP, an organization that creates international communications standards, has approved the NB-IoT and LTE CAT-M1 networks, which are specifically made for IoT applications in smart cities. Smart streetlights may communicate directly with nearby cell phone towers thanks to these long-range, low-power, high-availability, and highly secure communication networks.
Smart street lamps have already been deployed by a number of cities throughout the world. Among them are the European cities of Oslo, Copenhagen, Bristol, Texel, Helmond, and Dortmund; the American cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Oklahoma; the Latin American cities of Mexico and Buenos Aires; and the Asian cities of Jaipur, Seoul, and Jakarta.
According to Shah, more than 20% of cities in the world are testing smart streetlights. Cities aren’t the only places trying to gain from smart street lighting; campuses, industrial parks, and seaports are all interested.
