Could Cell Coverage in Your City Effectively Manage Your Lighting System?

When installing cellular based IoT devices across your city, such as smart streetlighting controllers, you expect each one of them to connect seamlessly to the carriers’ infrastructure. Unfortunately, most of those devices are fixed assets (not mobile), meaning that if they happen to be installed in a location where the signal is poor or inexistent, you cannot move them to improve the signal quality. Adding a longer antenna or a signal booster are not viable options either as most of the time, rural areas are just not covered by service providers and if they do, coverage is often poor.

From the many years of experience that we have acquired, we can undoubtably confirm that even biggest urban environments will present no-coverage areas (blank spots). Therefore, we feel that the best approach is to deploy a mesh radio backhaul that connects to a few gateways connected either by a fixed LAN (or WAN) or cellular connectivity to the server.

There are major real-world advantages to mesh networking compared with other types of network topology:

• Get over natural obstacles easily
• Increase the quality of communications proportionally with the density of nodes
• Increasing the distance of communications from the gateway
• No need for routers as each node acts as a router
• Automatic commissioning of new nodes within the network territory
• Network auto-repair

By choosing the mesh network approach that we propose, a carrier doesn’t own your network, therefore you and only you decide if you ever want to replace it or not. In addition, the mesh / gateways design will not cost any additional fees if you make use of your existing LAN or WAN communication. Also, if you choose to install gateways that use cellular modems, the monthly cost per node will be less than $0.04 USD per month.

Another point to consider is technology sunset for cellular based IoT devices, those devices are municipal assets that you expect to be functional for multiple years (ideally 15 – 20). There will be a time in the next 10-15 years where the Telecom carriers will simply send an end-of-life date for support of 4G or 5G. Even we tried to get a written letter from two different carriers for a 10-year network availability, the first agreeing on a maximum period of 6 years and the second never agreeing to anything. This certainly means that once the 4G or 5G is no longer supported, you will have to replace each node from your system for a compatible one at full price. If you consider the total purchase of a Control System (including the software), a city will have to consider an additional 50% of the total purchase only to have it under cellular instead of with a mesh network. And in 10 years’ time, the cellular nodes may not be functional anymore with 6G or 7G technology.

Finally, we can say with certainty that the right wireless mesh technology enables lighting control solutions that provide reliability, security, flexibility and can scale to control large lighting networks offering solutions that improve energy usage and control with less cost and complexity than ever before.