The City of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada is home to over 720,000 residents, Canada’s largest and busiest airport, and the largest municipally owned fiber optic network in Canada. Nearly 500 miles of fiber connecting to over 290 sites is an opportune asset, bringing awareness to both the challenges and promises of 5G.
The city’s infrastructure, specifically the streetlight posts, hadn’t aesthetically deviated much since the Paris World Fair of 1878 introduced electric lighting to cities. As telecom companies accessed streetlights to expand their next generation technology around the world, the city found signs of external equipment compromising the structure of existing posts that could not support the infrastructure.
The city’s staff had safety concerns about the new installations and noticed a pattern of damaged equipment. Moreover, at the time, no streetlight post in Canada had the capabilities required to navigate this change in use of infrastructure. Entirely new infrastructure would be needed, so the city approached its vendor, StressCrete Group, to collaborate on a new design.
Over the course of a year, StressCrete Group and city staff built out the blueprints. They created a smart pole prototype that would comply with the regulatory body, the Electrical Standards Authority (ESA).
“The biggest challenge was creating separate chambers in the pole, since each tenant needs to have a dedicated spot,” said Luke van Vliet, Chief Growth Officer at StressCrete. “That was where we had to focus our design efforts. We had to establish innovative ways to produce the poles that met that design criteria.”
There was also the issue of power. When unauthorized attachments were installed on city infrastructure, the equipment would draw power from the city without permission, so the entire interior design had to be reevaluated. The local utility company, Alectra Utilities, was consulted at the start of the project and throughout the design.
The standard streetlight poles were hollow with one big cavity to pull cabling. When unauthorized attachments sought power, it could damage the cabling. “In the new design, separate conduits were created to allow for different uses and to protect the cabling,” van Vliet explained. “There is a conduit for city cabling to power the light in the smart pole and two extra conduits to allow for external connection for power.” Another conduit provides an external link to the fiber infrastructure belonging to the telecommunications carrier or the city.
The site is still under construction and the “smart” equipment hasn’t been installed, but
this shows how the poles look like the standard streetlight poles.
With safety in mind, the design also had to guarantee that repairs could be made without exposing technicians to RF at close range, so an external switch was included to disconnect power to the attachment.
“The real genius of the smart pole design was accommodating both the integration of small cells for 5G and third-party equipment such as road weather information stations, traffic sensors, WiFi access points, environmental sensors, and other IoT devices,” van Vliet said.
After several years, the hard work of StressCrete Group and the City of Mississauga is paying off. The smart pole is a first in Canada and is now the standard for new developments. Currently, the city has a permitting process, and is working on a digital process to accelerate approvals for the installation of smart poles across the metro area. In fact, many other Canadian cities have benefited from this work and are ordering smart poles from StressCrete Group for their 5G buildouts.
Mississauga’s approach to this challenge will allow the city to thrive, even on the heels of the arrival of 6G, according to officials. “This work has proven the city’s ability to be proactive in matters involving emerging technology, adapt to disruptions boldly, and work collaboratively not just within different departments but with existing vendors, agencies and regulators,” says van Vliet.
Mississauga’s goal is to inspire the world as a dynamic and beautiful global city for creativity and innovation, with vibrant, safe and connected communities – this work is just the start.
For more information, go to https://www.scgrp.com/.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
Reader Interactions