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Lighting Control in Grand rapids, MI
The City of Grand Rapids, Michigan, starts a new lighting project with the help of Dimonoff
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As we discovered in our last article, future readiness for smart city applications implies 3 main challenges:
Today we are discovering a little more about future readiness in network connectivity.
Future readiness in network connectivity
Future-Proof Connectivity Standard
There is an abundance of network connectivity options today, that come with various price tags. Many are robust enough to serve for decades to come, but some will become obsolete, even in the space of 6 to 8 years. Especially for network types not owned by the city, like cellular networks, it is essential to understand how long they will be around. Some vendors offer 2G mobile connectivity for their street lighting management systems, even though this standard is being phased out in most of the world. For some regions, 3G is also already in jeopardy. Research the prospects of the connectivity standard you are planning to use and verify the timeline the carriers commit to, in writing, for supporting it, and a good comprehension of the tariffication and Total cost of Ownership over the life of the system.
Future-Proof Bandwidth
Because the street lighting system is often the backbone for other smart city applications, it is important to ensure that its network component (often a wireless mesh network) have enough bandwidth to support them. Furthermore, you need to plan, the present and long-term requirements of your smart city system. You also need to understand what these requirements might mean in terms of network bandwidth:
These considerations must be balanced carefully against the cost of purchasing bandwidth. Some companies offer solutions where recurring network fees apply for the lifetime of the system, in order to lower the initial cost of material; others, such as Dimonoff, offer a solution where the wireless mesh network is an integral part of the hardware, without any network fees, except for the few gateway that could be connected with a cellular link.
Some type of robust low-band mesh networks can work well combined with intelligent devices at the edge, but scalability (total size of network, including devices for other types of applications) of these networks clearly needs to be validated, in addition to interference immunity, security, latency and capability to do upgrades over the air (OTA), etc. In short, can you tackle all these aspects, for a very large–scale network?
As we are going deeper into readiness, we will discover in our next article more about future readiness in software.
