Top 5 cities implementing IOT connected street lights
With IoT, it was only a matter of time that development efforts would go as far as enabling large-scale projects, just like in all those Hollywood flicks. With the advent of smart phones and tablets, Phillips and Siemens were a few of the first to offer Smart Home technology solutions. However, to enable an entire city takes a lot more than just a few hacks and tweaks. It requires a well thought through design, created from the bottom up with scalability, infrastructure integrity and security in mind every step of the way.
For that purpose, IoT is the answer. With Juniper Research (UK) estimating a USD 15 Billion savings schedule, the want and need for IoT connected cities is definitely the talk of the town. And working on this model, the following 5 cities have taken up the initiative to connect streetlights, to begin with, enabling a much more effective compliance regulation, energy management, and scalable as well as secure all the while reliable network.
TOKYO
There was no way Japan was going to stay behind in an engineering project. And what better location to try out a massive technology and engineering merger than the heart of the land of Mount Fuji. Tokyo is well on its way to becoming the first city with almost all street lights connected with the IoT technology stack empowering the city and saving on cost as well as energy. With an automated management system in place, the lights will fade out based on how much light an external sensor is receiving over the course of the day and will even activate during the day time if weather conditions leave the city in a cloud of darkness.
SINGAPORE
GridComm is partnering up with Intel to deliver 100,000 IoT enabled devices over the course of the year. Why? To get Singapore’s street lighting mechanism to respond to the need of users taking into account traffic conditions, pedestrian activity as well as lighting conditions based off of external weather and the moons appearance at night. Nge Tuck Long, VP Sales and Marketing for GridComm states how the city can employee BigData analyze the city’s past and present conditions and develop a completely new methodology of strategizing city and urban management.
STOCKHOLM
Stockholm has plans of completely reinventing its ctreetlight scape by 2040, with the aim of bringing every single streetlight on board its IoT enabled infrastructure. The capabilities they are looking towards are similar to Singapore’s for future analytics and heuristics based management of one of the busiest and bustling cities on the face of the planet. This they are doing with the help of Itron collaborating with the city’s traffic department utilizing theire Streetlight Vision (SLV) management software.
AMSTERDAM
Whereas the city may not be famous for its technological involvement, Amsterdam is gearing up for the upcoming decade with a streetlight program to cut down on its energy consumption, save big on tax payer money and reinvest its savings into other things, such as integrating solar powered home equipment and connecting it to the city’s grid.. Talk about a smart plan for a smart city.
NEW YORK CITY
With a total area of 1,213 km2, the city’s Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, has announced its NYCx Challenge, inviting entrepreneurs, technologists and everyone in between to come together and come up with ideas for how to solve the city’s problems and challenges, for the coming decade. Free super-fast Wifi, and a traffic congestion system were the first step, now moving towards streetlights connected on the same grid, with IoT enabled cloud based data management for the world’s most happening, soon to be smart, city.