Connected Street Lighting: the next Milestone for Smart Cities

Neill Young, Vertical Innovation Lead, GSMA
Smart cities are now rapidly coming to life. As urban planners look to the possibilities of the IoT to improve city infrastructure, the benefits to both local economies and residents’ living experiences are becoming increasingly apparent.  An imminent example of this is in smart lighting: street lights equipped with connected sensors, allowing units to respond automatically to environmental factors, and be controlled remotely in response to need.
There has been a recent surge in uptake of connected lighting for city streets, as planners recognise its potential for enhanced safety and functionality, and concurrent reductions in environmental impact and cost. Streetlights around the world are currently in the process of being upgraded from traditional sodium lamps to more reliable and energy-efficient LED lighting. Now is therefore the ideal juncture at which to install communications technology simultaneously, making the upgrade to connectivity cost-effective from the start.
In one German city, for instance, the combination of LED upgrade and usage management via Deutsche Telekom’s mobile network has led to energy savings of nearly 70 per cent.  Connected lighting units also offer a convenient base throughout urban areas for sensors intended for other smart city functions, such as monitoring traffic, parking, foot flow and air quality. The benefits of connected LED lighting were a key consideration at the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress this year; representatives from Philips Lighting and Ericsson met to discuss the impact particularly on sustainability, and agreed that a target to upgrade all public lighting by 2025 would see immense savings both in cost and environmental legacy.
The upward trend in adoption of smart lighting is already set to continue apace.  Philips Lighting signed an agreement with China Mobile last month to develop the potential of smart lighting across the largest country in the world.  In India too, Philips anticipate that smart lights may prove the most extensive of IoT devices over the next five to ten years. Harshvardan Chitale, Managing Director of Philips Lighting India, predicts that intelligent lighting units will in fact become “the default” over that period; smart lighting “is growing very rapidly; globally, and also in India, smart connected lighting for us is doubling every year.”
Mobile network operators are ideally suited to aid smart city planners in the task ahead.  As they already possess total coverage over urban areas, no additional infrastructure is necessary to connect city lights and sensors hosted alongside them. In addition to this, by offering the security and reliability of low power, wide area networks in licensed spectrum, MNOs are best-placed to support large numbers of low-cost devices requiring long battery lives, minimal maintenance and long ranges.  They are therefore natural partners in developing what promises to be the new standard in lighting. Harshvardan Chitale compares the coming shift to that between landlines and mobile phones; that “we anticipate over the next five to ten years – closer to five – when people think of upgrading their existing lights, the will install lighting systems which are smart.” It will be one of the first truly large-scale implementations of IoT technology in smart cities, and one which enables many others – and MNOs are those most capable of making it happen.
To find out more about how operators can assist with the deployment of smart street lighting, please view our Street Lighting Guide