The smart city of the future is one that is sustainable, uses less energy, produces less pollution and provides a safer, better quality of life. To make a city “smart”, it takes Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as small cells, Wi-Fi, cameras, environmental sensors, intelligent lighting and transportation monitors. These smart city applications drive increased efficiency in city services, support tourism and enhance commerce.
But the connectivity needed for smart cities is costly and time-consuming to build out, with every municipality demanding a different design of connected infrastructure and requiring lengthy permitting processes. Additionally, trenching fiber and getting power to such assets add a good deal of expense and time, not to mention disruption to traffic, business and tourism.
Signify, the world leader in lighting, has found itself perfectly positioned, at the top of cities’ existing street poles, to shed some light on the problem. Signify’s broadband luminaires – which embed a wireless node into intelligent LED lighting fixtures – provide a solution to the dilemmas that slow smart city connectivity.
“Signify’s BrightSites solution operates over the unlicensed 60 GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum and creates a wireless gigabit mesh network, solving the last-mile broadband challenge. It effectively transforms a city’s outdoor lighting into a platform of connectivity. Simply put, where there is light, there can be connectivity,” said Malik Ishak, Director, Smart City Connectivity at Signify.
The deployment of Signify’s broadband luminaire is executed by simply swapping out the light fixture on a city’s existing outdoor light poles, thus eliminating the need to trench fiber to each pole. Using existing poles also eliminates the challenge of finding a new pole to host the wireless technology that will match the existing design, as well as lengthy permitting process and power conversion required for IoT devices such as WiFi access points, cameras and sensors on the pole.
“Cities can build their own municipal networks using uncongested and unlicensed mmWave spectrum,” Ishak said. “They can build out this high-speed wireless fiber mesh network and use it for digital services, both extending and complementing physical fiber in the last mile.” Broadband luminaires also allow a city to bring all of its different applications together into a single, scalable municipal network.
“To build out a single smart pole, you’ve got to go through a lengthy permitting process and then trench fiber and power to the pole. Every municipality – even every neighborhood within that municipality – has a different pole design, too,” Ishak said. “Using existing street light poles provides faster time-to-market for broadband applications such as small cells, Wi-Fi, traffic monitoring and parking application and fixed wireless access, to name a few.”
Outdoor lighting infrastructure is readily available and is well suited as a transport layer for multi-gigabit connectivity, given its proximity to people and traffic. Spacing of 150-500 feet and the elevation of the poles is ideal for the propagation of mmWave spectrum. A municipality would typically need to deploy broadband luminaires in only a quarter of its streetlights to create this gigabit speed mesh network.
Intelligent lighting also eliminates the need for a city to audit its streetlights by communicating when a light is out. When a truck does have to roll, technicians will know what replacement part to take with them, supporting significant operation and maintenance cost savings.
In addition to municipalities, utilities, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and enterprises can all benefit from deploying broadband luminaire networks. Potential users include university campuses, arenas, ports, resorts, business parks and retail. “The need for gigabit speed connectivity cannot be understated by cities or enterprises,” Ishak said.
For broadband smart city technology to reach its potential, hundreds of thousands of nodes must be deployed. The complexities of this build out are being simplified by Signify with its BrightSites solution in an aesthetically pleasing form factor by replacing luminaires on one of the most valuable and underused city assets, their existing light poles.
“It has been a challenge for the industry to densify networks, including getting fiber and power to assets as well as securing permitting for installations,” Ishak said. “We have found an efficient way to do this leveraging cities’ existing infrastructure to create gigabit mesh networks for a host of applications while upgrading to intelligent, energy-efficient LED lighting in the process.”
For more information and to contact Signify, visit https://www.signify.com/global/innovation/brightsites.
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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