Making brighter cities

San Francisco selects UK’s Telensa for street lighting ‘smart’ controls trial

Trial includes utilising information from traffic sensors as part of an adaptive lighting solution linked to changing traffic flows

CAMBRIDGE, England, January 21, 2014: Telensa, the UK’s market-leading ‘smart’ wireless street lighting technology company, has been selected by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to demonstrate its PLANet (Public Lighting Active Network) street light central management system (CMS) in two locations in the city of San Francisco.

The SFPUC owns, operates and maintains over half the city’s street lights and recently announced a project to replace its high pressure sodium cobra-head style light fixtures with ultra-efficient light emitting diodes (LED) luminaires.

Using Telensa’s advanced ultra narrow band (UNB) wireless CMS will enable the SFPUC to control switching and dimming of each lamp and also to measure energy usage and detect faulty street lights. The PLANet system helps customers deliver significant savings on energy bills and to further reduce carbon emissions.

In addition, Telensa will demonstrate its system’s ability to utilise information from traffic sensors as part of an adaptive lighting solution whereby the lighting level on roadways is automatically adjusted to suit traffic flows.

Telensa is partnering with a leading lighting company and JAM Services to deliver the project which includes the provision of three different sizes of LED luminaires.

Paul Dunn, sales & marketing director, Telensa, said: “We are delighted to be involved in this innovative trial in San Francisco that demonstrates our ability to add multiple sensor types to the system and create an interactive ‘smart’ network. Our PLANet system is already used by scores of public authorities in the United Kingdom, as well as by a growing number across the Americas, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region but this will be the first to have two different kinds of additional sensors.

Our PLANet system was developed to meet stringent European standards so uses lower transmission power than US competitor systems yet has far greater range due to our ultra narrow band wireless technology,” added Paul Dunn. “Customers opt for the Telensa system because our long range, low power wireless solution is the simplest to deploy, the most reliable, extremely cost-effective and can be applied to all types of lighting fixtures, retro or new-build deployments.

Telensa’s telecells and dimming modules are fitted to street lights and these connect wirelessly to a base station which accommodates up to 10,000 telecells over a range of 1-2 miles or 2-3km (urban) and 3-5 miles or 5-8km (rural). Wide area coverage is then achieved by linking these base stations in a cellular architecture creating networks of several hundred thousand lights across hundreds of square miles.