[Smart City] It is now popular to install LED street lights with Wi-Fi in cities
NBC Universal reported that LED street lights installed in Plainville, Connecticut, USA, use advanced connectivity technology. The 123 smart street lights installed in the town can provide free Wi-Fi. 23 of the 123 street lights will serve as access points, with speeds up to 10 Mbps outside the town hall. The remaining 90 Wi-Fi street lights will serve as extenders to transmit signals.
The town uses ad revenue to pay for the annual Wi-Fi service fee of more than $10,000. Town officials also said the new Wi-Fi service will be available within one month.
In fact, such smart street lights are no longer new. As early as October last year, the first integrated smart road light pole in the country was piloted on Dagu Road in Shanghai, combining multiple functions such as charging stations, WIFI, charging stations, and emergency assistance. Now, in the Jinling Zhi Du (Golden Collar Capital) Park located in Pudong, Shanghai, more than 40 smart street light poles have been added. It is said that in the future, the street light poles in Pudong will fully enable a multi-functional mode, realizing the "1+X" comprehensive application (charging stations, Wi-Fi, environmental monitoring, mobile base stations, etc.), advertising rental, etc. Moreover, the intelligent detection system combined with them can also identify a person's age and gender, and the information screen combines this information to publish corresponding content, and even analyzes various information on the road through the high-definition camera above.
Other cities are not to be outdone either. Recently, two new smart street lights have been erected at the east entrance of the Zhongxing Street underpass in Xingtai. The Wi-Fi wireless network can cover a radius of about 100 meters... These street lights standing one by one are becoming the "benchmarks" of smart city construction, and these "benchmarks" can eventually be linked together to form the city's intelligent management network, becoming one of the best vehicles for advancing smart city construction.
However, when it comes to smart cities, have you ever imagined it to be like this:
If not, at least like this
Hehe, in fact, the current smart city is just like this...
Not nearly as fancy as imagined.
However, without lighting, there can be no smart city. First, the energy-saving significance of smart lighting is deeply ingrained in people's minds. Not only do LEDs save electricity, but simply relying on intelligent control of switching times and brightness can significantly reduce urban electricity consumption. What's even more remarkable is that smart lighting comes with built-in sensor functions. As the visible and invisible hands in IoT applications, it incorporates various objects such as the environment, people, vehicles, and things into the perception network through the lighting network, enabling broadband and application coverage throughout the entire city, providing a supporting role for the construction of smart cities.
Just imagine, it can provide lighting and also install monitoring. Moreover, its placement layout is very suitable for measuring foot traffic, vehicle flow, temperature and other data. A single lighting system can centrally solve the installation of various sensors, reducing redundant construction. The key is that its appearance is also quite good (each one is a tall pole, as shown below)
San Jose Smart Light Pole
Philips is undoubtedly the leader in this field. Companies such as GE, Schréder, Huawei, Ericsson, Verizon, Cree, and Feile Acoustics are also vying for market share in this field. Smart lighting has long been a major direction of smart city practice in recent years and has been continuously endowed with more functions and missions.
This is really not just empty talk. Philips has partnered with Ericsson to launch a project connecting smart LED lights in European and American cities, combining green lighting with mobile broadband. Philips provides smart lighting and installs LTE base stations inside the light poles, simultaneously solving two problems for the city: green lighting and providing network access to citizens, accelerating the payback period for urban infrastructure investment, making the upfront costs of installing and managing these systems more affordable, thereby reducing pressure on city budgets.
Philips has already deployed about 150 such light poles in Los Angeles and San Jose in the United States. Within the next three years, thousands of such smart street lights will be sold in cities across the country. Philips is also running light pole pilot programs around the world. Florida's public utilities and cities such as Copenhagen are currently testing the concept. Although exact figures are difficult to pin down, staff estimate that there are 26 million street lights in the United States alone. Los Angeles has the second-largest number, with about 210,000 powered light poles, of which more than 140,000 have already been converted to LED. San Jose has around 63,000 light poles, of which roughly 20,000 are LED, while the remaining poles are open to conversion proposals of any kind through a tendering process. According to market research firm Navigant Research, the company has counted more than 13 million LED street lights worldwide and projects that number will grow to 116 million by 2023.
Future trends are a tormenting little imp—unseen and untouchable, yet they always leave you itching. Although the vision of smart cities has been hyped up by all manner of utopian ideas, ideals must exist somewhere, and after all, the street light pole has already arrived. Here we borrow a slogan from a certain tech company: "The present is the future."