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What smart street lighting is, and what it changes.
Smart street lighting is usually sold as a technology. For a municipality it is closer to an accounting change: every luminaire stops being an unknown that someone reports when it fails, and becomes an asset with a schedule, a measured consumption and a maintenance record.
What is smart street lighting?
Smart street lighting is a street lighting network where each luminaire carries a controller that reports its condition and its energy use and accepts a schedule remotely, so a city can dim, group, measure and repair its lighting without sending a truck to look.
It is built from three layers: a controller on each pole, a wireless network that reaches them, and a management platform that holds the inventory and applies the rules. Paired with an LED conversion, Mississauga measured 55% lower energy costs against its 2011 baseline, and cities that have published targets set them in the same range. Maintenance visits fall as automatic fault detection replaces patrols and complaint calls.
What smart street lighting is, and what it changes.
The three layers
Almost every disagreement about smart lighting is really a disagreement about one of these three layers. Naming them separately is what makes a comparison between suppliers possible.
- The node: a controller in the luminaire’s NEMA ANSI C136.41 socket or Zhaga Book 18 port, or inside the fixture where there is no socket. It dims, schedules, measures and reports.
- The network: a self-forming, self-healing wireless mesh, Wi-SUN FAN or DigiMesh, with a gateway carrying traffic back over Ethernet or cellular.
- The platform: the software that holds the inventory, applies the schedules and turns a fault into a work order.
What it costs and when it pays backThe three layers as productsChoosing the platform layerCarrying sensors on the same network
What it saves, from published projects
These are figures municipalities have published about their own networks. Two of them are targets a city set before its deployment and one is a measured result, and the difference is marked, because a business case built on the wrong one does not survive scrutiny.
- Montréal, target: 35% energy and 55% maintenance, across a 132,500-node multi-vendor network.
- Mississauga, measured: 55% energy against the 2011 baseline, metered in the node, on a network Dimonoff has operated since 2012.
- Laval, target: CA$2.75 million a year, 15 million kWh a year and 10,607 tonnes of CO2 a year, with a five-year payback.
- Ranges quoted across projects: 50% to 70% energy reduction when controls accompany an LED conversion, and 30% to 40% fewer truck rolls.
How a project actually runs
The shape is consistent enough to plan around. A pilot proves the numbers on the city’s own network; the deployment then runs in phases, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, so the old and the new systems coexist instead of requiring a single cutover.
- Pilot: three months, 100 to 500 luminaires, on production hardware and a live platform.
- Deployment: 10,000 to 50,000 luminaires in 6 to 18 months from signature to full operation.
- Installation: the controller plugs in within seconds and identifies itself on the mesh; commissioning is guided from a mobile app with geolocation and an instant functional test.
- Training: three tracks are included, for operations, for field technicians, and for IT on the API, the integrations and security.
The questions worth asking early
Two decisions are expensive to reverse: who can manage the network afterwards, and where its data lives. Both are far easier to settle before a specification is written than after a first phase is installed.
- Can the platform manage nodes from other manufacturers, so a second phase is not locked to the first supplier?
- Does the schedule survive a communications outage, or does the street depend on the link?
- Where is the data hosted, and does that satisfy the residency rules the organisation is bound by?
- Is there a cooperative purchasing route that removes a full tender from the schedule?
Common questions about smart street lighting
How much does smart street lighting save?
Mississauga measured 55% lower energy costs against its 2011 baseline. Montréal and Laval published targets in the same range before their deployments, and a target is not a result. Counting the LED conversion and the controls together, the range usually quoted is 50% to 70%, with 30% to 40% fewer truck rolls. Typical payback on an LED-plus-controls project is four to eight years.
Does every luminaire need a NEMA socket?
No. An external node fits an ANSI C136.41 socket or a Zhaga Book 18 port; where a fixture has neither, an internal node is installed inside it. Both cover LED, HPS, MH and MV fixtures.
Can a city keep the controllers it already has?
Usually yes. A platform built for it manages legacy nodes and new nodes on the same system, which is how a migration proceeds neighbourhood by neighbourhood instead of as a single replacement. Montréal runs 132,500 nodes from several manufacturers this way.
How long before a city sees results?
A three-month pilot on 100 to 500 luminaires produces measured energy and fault figures from the city’s own network. Full deployment of 10,000 to 50,000 luminaires takes 6 to 18 months from signature to full operation.
Start with your own numbers.
Send us your fixture inventory and we will show you what a pilot would measure on your network, and what the published projects suggest it would save.