Making brighter cities

Smart city solutions

Find out more about Telensa solutions, our technology and the markets in which we work.

Smart Street Lighting
Urban Data

Building data-driven
cities on smart streetlight
infrastructure

Smart street lighting

Central control saves energy, improves service levels and enables lighting to respond to citizen needs. It transforms isolated street lighting infrastructure into the connected foundation for other smart city sensor applications.

LED street lighting made future-proof and adaptable
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1. Community

Adapt to requests for dark skies or over fear of crime

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2. Industrial

Adapt to shift patterns and shipments in industrial zones

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3. Highway

Adapt lighting dynamically to highway traffic levels

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4. Events

Adapt lighting for events such as New Year fireworks

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5. Emergency

Adapt lighting to assist emergency service response

The case for wireless controls

Cities and utilities across the world are investing heavily to install cleaner, more reliable LED street lighting. Adding wireless controls completes the potential of LED – increasing energy savings by up to 30% and cutting maintenance costs with automatic fault alerts and self-diagnosis. Controls also provide accurate energy metering and service level statistics for auditing LED investment performance. Most of all, controls enable lighting to adapt to the needs of the city, both in real-time and over the long term.

 

 

Smart street lighting continues to solidify its position as the foundational layer for broader smart city projects. These projects are now not only saving cities and utilities billions of dollars in energy and maintenance costs, but have also begun to open up new revenue opportunities.

Ben Gardner
President, Northeast Group

Key infrastructure projects such as street & public lighting demand the highest standards to ensure reliability and value for money, and Telensa’s proposition more than satisfies both of those criteria.

Scott Waters
CEO, City of Darwin
0m+ streetlights
connected
0+ cities
covered
0+ networks
built
Telensa PLANet

Telensa PLANet is an end-to-end intelligent street lighting system, consisting of wireless nodes connecting individual lights, a dedicated network owned by the city and a central management application. The system pays for itself in reduced energy and maintenance costs, improves quality of maintenance through automatic fault reporting and turns streetlight poles into hubs for smart city sensors. With more than 2 million lights connected, Telensa PLANet is the world’s most popular connected streetlight system.

Telecell control nodes

  • 5,000 per base station
  • Very low power (0.7W)
  • Works without network
  • Fixture independent
  • Metering and GPS

Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) Network

  • Range up to 10 miles/16 km
  • Minimal data costs
  • ETSI standards path
  • Simple light pole install

Central Management System

  • Map-based control programs
  • Scales to millions of lights
  • Integration options for asset management, metering and billing systems
Why Telensa?

Telensa is the market share leader in smart street lighting, with more experience of deploying systems of more than 100,000 lights than anyone else. When other smart city vendors are promoting small-scale pilots, we are rolling out whole cities, counties and states – with a controls range that covers every type of lit asset. What’s more, we have more than 10 years experience of doing so. Telensa PLANet is designed specifically for the finely-balanced business case for smart street lighting, with ultra-low power and bandwidth consumption, an advanced control set to maximise savings, and long-term durability.

Featured resource

The Utility Case for Smart Street Lighting

What lessons can utilities learn from Georgia Power’s smart street lighting roll-out?

Case study

The City of Edinburgh Council

Learn how deploying smart LED street lighting will save The City of Edinburgh Council more than £54…

Urban IQ for smart cities

Connected street lighting infrastructure is an ideal platform for adding additional sensor applications.  No two cities are the same, so Telensa has developed open technologies that fit with current systems and are ready for future directions. Sensor hub connects any combination of sensors to a light pole, using hybrid networks of lighting and cellular connectivity. Pre-integrated with a range of leading sensor-makers, the device is designed to connect any 3rd party sensor. Telensa’s dashboard is designed to complement existing data visualization projects. It is built on Microsoft Power BI, so it has the backing of a vast worldwide ecosystem of developers and integrators.

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1. Road temperature

Improve targeting and responsiveness of salt spreading

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2. Drainage

Prevent floods and enable more efficient gully cleaning

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3. Wind

Provide traffic warnings and improved air dispersion data

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4. Air quality

More detailed data on street-by-street air quality

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5. Waste bins

Cleaner streets and a more efficient collections

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6. Traffic

Adapt highway lighting to traffic levels

Sensor hub

  • Provides power and connectivity to multiple 3rd party sensors
  • Provides local wireless connectivity for sensors on-the-pole and near-the-pole, such as those in waste bins or drains
  • Combines UNB lighting network and cellular connectivity, such as NB-IoT

We live in a data-driven world, but we’re not going to monitor stuff just to monitor it - it has to make sense to the city! That’s why we have chosen these smart city applications to open up endless possibilities for us to improve city efficiency and save money - the dollars can really add up.

Wayne S. Martin Esq.
Harrisburg’s City Engineer

Dashboard

  • Built on Microsoft Power BI
  • Multiple sensor insights to drive smart, more efficient and joined-up services
  • Open interfaces and worldwide ecosystem of developers and integrators

 

Telensa is building on the business case for its smart street lighting by providing cities with an open, low-cost platform to add multiple sensor applications.

Ryan Citron
Navigant Research, Senior Analyst
Urban IQ for real-time data insights

Telensa is developing a new generation of light pole sensor devices featuring smartphone Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, enabling detailed real-time insights to be affordably derived for the first time. These multi-sensor pods harness new developments in camera and radar imaging from the automotive industry, combined with AI technology from the latest smartphones. They create a new opportunity to understand in fine detail how our streets really work. There are no privacy implications, as no video is stored and no personal data is collected.

Multi-sensor pod

  • Low-cost camera/radar imaging with Qualcomm smartphone AI
  • Detailed, real-time data covering all traffic types including pedestrians
  • All data is anonymised on the device using machine learning
  • Edge processing reduces comms costs to a minimum
  • No video stored or transmitted

 

We can now gather detailed, real-time insights on traffic mix, origin-destination trends, cyclist and pedestrian movements. This will transform our strategic planning to benefit the citizens of Cambridge.

Dan Clarke
Program Manager, Smart Cambridge
Urban Data Project

Urban data is the mosaic of street-by-street, minute-by-minute information that makes up a city’s digital twin. It has the potential to make city living better for everyone.

The Urban Data Project, driven by Telensa, is a consortium solution that will build upon the changing economics of data collection, to give cities the tools to own and use their data responsibly, with full citizen oversight.

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1. Map hyperlocal air quality

to enable better transport planning and safer walking routes

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2. Encourage cycling and walking

by creating safer and cleaner routes and infrastructure

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3. Measure impact of new developments

in real-time, speeding up projects and getting it right first time

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4. Reduce congestion and pollution

by understanding traffic types, routes and destinations

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5. Align services to citizen needs

with an accurate model of how cities are really used

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6. Regenerate bricks and mortar retail

using precise insights of how people interact

The trust infrastructure for cities and citizens

City Data Guardian is the trust platform, built on Microsoft Azure, that will enable cities to apply transparent privacy policies, comply with data regulations, and make data available to improve services and drive future city revenues. There are three stages to becoming a data-driven city:

1. Collect

Streetlight mounted multi-sensor pods combine sensors, imaging and smartphone AI to derive insights, including traffic, people, air quality, noise and events. This data contributes to the city’s digital twin.

2. Protect

City Data Guardian structures data products, applies the privacy policy and anonymisation, enables controlled sharing and publishes the live policy for citizen oversight.

3. Apply

The Chief Data Officer can now control precisely what data is shared and who has access. Cities and citizens benefit from becoming more data-driven – through better targeted and more efficient services, better informed citizens, and a potential new source of city income.

With a shared value of providing infrastructure built on trust, that enables cities to take control of their data strategy, working with Telensa on the Urban Data Project was a natural fit.

Bert Van Hoof
Partner Group Program Manager
Azure IoT, Microsoft

The Greater Cambridge Partnership has funded ‘Smart Cambridge’ to see how data supports activities that help to make Greater Cambridge even better to live and work in. The Urban Data Project is part of this innovative approach.

Claire Ruskin
Executive Board Member for the Greater Cambridge Partnership and CEO of Cambridge Network
Smart Street
Lighting