The City of Amsterdam has been very actively engaged in smart city development. Upgrading the street lighting infrastructure with new technology was high on the wish list of the city. Thaumatec was able to deliver a Proof of Concept within 6 weeks based on the new LoRa Technology resulting in modern possibilities and breaking from the traditional methods.
Smart management of smart cities
Smart cities are becoming smarter every day. The solutions implemented in smart city theories can help cities reduce costs and improve the quality of services. One of the most popular adoptions of this theory is smart streetlight management. Usually, lighting systems in the cities are old and ineffective. That’s why one of the most important goals of implementing smart streetlight management systems with IoT solutions was to reduce costs by decreasing the electricity wastage and manpower to manage it.
In an old-fashioned way, the manual streetlight system was working all the time with maximum intensity, even when it wasn’t necessary. In the new approach, smart street lights use wireless technologies (like LoRa, NB-IoT) and a set of sensors to monitor the amount of energy, level of lighting on the street and the necessity to increase it.
A problem to solve
The City of Amsterdam has been actively engaged in smart city development. Upgrading the streetlight management infrastructure with new technology was high up on their wish list.
The streetlight management network infrastructure for street lights, traffic lights and video cameras, dating from the 1960s. It was not designed for the amount of data it currently transports. Upgrading the infrastructure in a traditional manner was expensive and impacted the traffic in the city. New cables had to be dug in to replace the old cabling. The CoA was looking at how new technology could improve its business case for upgrading the infrastructure.
Our way
Upgrading the street lighting infrastructure with new technology was a must. The choice of the City of Amsterdam for Thaumatec was based on the fact that Thaumatec was able to deliver a Proof of Concept within 6 weeks based on the new LoRa Technology.
Thaumatec built a LoRa based connector that was integrated into the existing streetlight management infrastructure. This way the disruption was minimal and all infra were retrofitted as quickly as possible. The connector box communicated via the KPN LoRa network with the ThingWorx platform. The platform enabled users to control the streetlights, like turning them on/ off.
Our IoT based smart street-lighting system was cost-efficient, practical, eco-friendly and the safest way to save energy.
