Smart street furniture is finding adoption by governments and industry players across the world. This trend can be attributed to both the supply and demand for such solutions. There are a number of new and innovative products being introduced in the smart street furniture market, ranging from smart poles and benches to fully integrated smart bus stops. Meanwhile, the demand for mobile broadband is increasingly driving the need for small cell architecture to supplement the macro cellular layer of commercial cellular coverage in today’s 4G and 5G networks. Street furniture such as utility poles, bus stop enclosures and other street-level infrastructure that can house wireless equipment offers a highly effective tool for telecom operators to bring their networks closer to their customers.
Countries are adopting smart street infrastructure to optimise the management of public infrastructure, provide amenities to residents, and offer connectivity such as free Wi-Fi. Its deployment is mushrooming across developed as well as developing countries.
A look at the key developments in various regions…
Europe
The UK government launched the Digital Connectivity Infrastructure Accelerator (DCIA) in 2021 with an investment of £4 million. The two-year project aims to facilitate network operators to access and deploy 5G mobile infrastructure on street furniture and public buildings. Meanwhile, the BT Group announced the first roll-out of 12 InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow, Scotland, which claim to offer 1 Gbps-capable public Wi-Fi among a range of other digital services. The first kiosk went live on Buchanan Street and a total of 150 kiosks have been rolled out in parts of London, Leeds and Glasgow. Also, Strawberry Energy UK has joined forces with Lewisham and Islington and Cancer Research UK to launch a network of smart benches. The solar-powered benches offer a contactless payment facility to enable the public to donate to the charity’s cancer research. Further, the Croydon Council in London signed a contract with VALO Smart City to introduce a network of smart bus shelters with features such as free public Wi-Fi, traffic sensors and air quality monitoring at 185 locations across Croydon.
In France, JCDecaux S.A. started the roll-out of its smart and digital street furniture in 34 cities in Hauts-de-Seine under its contract with the department council in 2019. The 15-year contract includes the installation and maintenance of 72 latest-generation digital street furniture units equipped with LCD screens to display real-time local information as well as advertisements. This is the first time that a department council in France has provided premium digital street furniture that enables closer communication with its citizens. Meanwhile, in Germany, Telefónica Deutschland and O2, in cooperation with energy provider Mainova, installed Frankfurt’s first smart 5G street light. The streetlight offers O2 customers robust 5G coverage within a radius of about 250 metres. Vodafone Germany also operationalised its first 5G standalone radio small cells in Cologne. The operator has equipped two street lamps with its own mobile communications technology.
As for Portugal, Ubiwhere and Accelleran, partners of the 5GCity consortium, jointly installed a new kind of multitenant and multitechnology street urban furniture in the city of Guimarães, offering neutral hosts the chance to use common multipurpose street light poles to provide cellular infrastructure and connectivity. The smart lamp post solution integrated both an electrical vehicle charging station and a long term evolution network enabled by small cells and radio access network (RAN)/virtualised RAN (vRAN) solutions. Further, the city of Wavre in Belgium installed the Smart In solution by AirVoice in urban furniture to offer smart city facilities such as Hi-Fi public address systems, Wi-Fi connectivity, video surveillance and presence detectors. Earlier, Nokia provided industrial-grade, 5G-ready private wireless networking to the Digital City Pole project in Leuven, Belgium. The project paved the way for citywide 5G connectivity.
North America
In 2021, Nokia signed a reseller agreement with ClearWorld to sell the latter’s smart poles across US cities and military bases. Deployed at locations such as parks, parking lots and roadways, the digital poles support applications such as video analytics, Wi-Fi access points, gunshot detection, smart lighting and licence plate reading. Another major partnership during the year was between Flytbase and Omniflow to create scalable highways for drone service providers by retrofitting a drone charging hub to their smart poles. Earlier, the City of Huntington Beach, California, announced its plans to provide high capacity mobile connectivity, high quality LED lighting and smart city enablement with smart fusion poles developed by Signify and the American Tower Corporation. Designed to meet capacity challenges in dense areas, the energy efficient smart fusion poles provide the infrastructure necessary for wireless broadband connectivity. Once deployed, the City of Huntington Beach will be the first in the country to utilise this smart pole technology.
Asia
In January 2023, Iveda launched a $1.5 million project for deploying its Utilus smart pole technology in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, equipping the country’s largest harbour city with critical IoT infrastructure. Utilus brings together video surveillance, AI-based video analytics, smart power systems, location-based trackers and smart sensors on a centralised platform, which is integrated into the existing infrastructure for smart city implementation. It consists of a smart power management and wireless mesh communications network with Wi-Fi, 4G, and 5G small cell capabilities, along with other wireless protocols as required.
In Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government signed an agreement with the Sumitomo Corporation to trial two types of multifunctional 5G smart poles. One smart pole model includes LED lighting and 5G base stations for multiple telecommunications carriers while the other incorporates LED lighting and a 5G shared-antenna system for joint use by multiple telcos. Meanwhile, Adlis Weiyin Smart Benches have been installed at the Great World in Singapore. The benches use solar panels to optimise energy consumption and offer standalone internet and mobile charging for up to five days in summer; this makes them highly suitable for tropical countries. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, installed 26 smart poles at six locations in the city in 2021. Last year, it demonstrated two smart poles equipped with surveillance drones for the first time in the country.
Further, edotco Services Lanka built nearly 500 street lamp poles and invested about $15 million in tower infrastructure in Sri Lanka. The company signed an agreement with the Board of Investment Sri Lanka to install an additional 400 multipurpose smart street lamp poles. In 2020, edotco Bangladesh deployed the country’s first-ever street furniture in collaboration with the Dhaka North City Corporation following a public-private partnership agreement to develop smart city features on a pilot basis. In China, Huanggang City recently opted for Signify’s BrightSites smart poles, Philips LED street lights and Interact IoT lighting systems to enable the province to save energy costs and reduce emissions while digitalising the urban infrastructure. Meanwhile, Malaysia-based Austral Techsmith collaborated with telecommunication infrastructure providers to install all-in-one smart poles across the country for 5G on-ground deployment. The poles can house multiple networks such as 5G, 4G, Wi-Fi routers, power units and smart street light functions. In Thailand, Ban Chang became the first smart city with a 5G smart pole system installed for real-time detection of airborne toxins and even facial analysis powered by artificial intelligence.
Australia
In Australia, the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia first started its Street Lighting & Smart Controls Programme in 2016. About 6.5 per cent of the country’s 2.3 million street lights were LEDs while smart street lighting controls were only deployed at a few trial sites. As of April 2023, about 1.4 million of the 2.5 million street lights have been converted to LEDs. However, only a few of these are being co-deployed with smart street lighting controls. Notably, New Zealand’s progress in this area is much better with around 75 per cent of the national street lighting network either deployed or committed to deployment of smart controls. Auckland’s deployment of 130,000 telematics wireless smart controls is the largest in the country by some margin.
Other regions
In 2022, Sydney-based National Narrowband Network Company signed a contract with the Wellness TechGroup to provide IoT network coverage to 70,000 smart street lights in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. As per the companies, this initiative will establish an infrastructure-based network that can accommodate other smart city initiatives. Additionally, Zain Bahrain recently partnered with LSS Technologies to enhance 5G deployment in the Bahrain Bay using the district’s existing street lamps. The solution turns street lights into 5G sites by adding compact enclosures.
