It’s now widely agreed that street lighting is a good starting point for bringing IoT solutions into a town or city. “Smart street lighting has long been viewed as the first major use case for ‘smart cities,’” states leading analysts Northeast Group in a 2019 market report, “with the communications and software platforms put in place serving additional smart city applications.”
Connectivity, of course, is what makes smart street lighting smart. Connected streetlights have the ability both to receive data from and send data to a central management system, or CMS, which is typically in the cloud. As a street lighting manager or operator, you can remotely monitor and control connected light points, create dimming schedules, roll out firmware and software updates, and track operational data such as energy usage and lamp burn hours. With sensors embedded in the street lighting system, you can also gather real-time and historical data on a wide variety of conditions, from temperature and air quality to noise levels on the streets and local automobile activity.
Although most connected street lighting systems work in a similar way, there are many different methods of exchanging data between connected streetlights and the CMS. These include cellular (2G, 3G, LTE, 5G, and NB-IoT), RF mesh, LoRa, Wi-Fi, and other medium- to long-range solutions.
As a municipality prepared to bring connected lighting online, how do you determine which communications method is best? The answer, for better or worse, is “It depends.” You have to understand how the different communications methods work, then match their capabilities to your specific needs.