The Biggest Smart Street-Lighting Deployments – a Rough Guide

Back in August, Enterprise IoT Insights published a list of the biggest smart street-lighting deployments. It was an imperfect list, then, we acknowledged, and likely to be an iterative exercise – to be updated as new information comes to light, and new cities limber up.

This is the first update. It now, belatedly, includes the biggest instalments by Liberty Lake IoT provider Itron, which has claimed five places on the revised list. Even so, the new list is also imperfect, for many of the same reasons as before.

Let us recap. Enterprise IoT Insights polled the leading smart-city lighting vendors for their biggest deployments. Some got back, including most of the top tier vendors. But some did not. Sensus doubted the value of the exercise, and refused to play. GridComm, Flashnet, and Rongwen did not respond.

Echelon, meanwhile, said its sales tend to be indirect, and its lighting technology is difficult to define and hard to count up.

Either way, the list shows the biggest deployments by only some of the biggest vendors. The results are geographically skewed towards North America and Europe, as a consequence, where these vendors are focused.

It also an ‘apples-and-oranges’ kind of a list, which counts entries for both cities, and states / provinces / counties. It even includes one countrywide deployment, for Jamaica.

When compiling it, Enterprise IoT Insights was minded to compare ‘apples with apples’. But many of the cities on the list have bigger populations than Jamaica, say, and so more people to light streets for – even if they are smaller by area, and their tarmac meterage is potentially less.

It is misleading, too, because some US states are taken as a whole, as in the case with Florida (in first), while certain Canadian provinces are counted separately from their capital cities, as in the case of Quebec and Montreal (fifth and second).

To complicate things further, cities often take technology from multiple suppliers. The 250,000-strong deployment in Montreal is in fact a shared infrastructure deal, according to sources.

You see the trouble, when the entry criteria are loose to begin with. But we stand by the results. This poll should be considered as a rough guide, to give a sense of the scale of the work – and a ranking of lighting / sensor deployments by volume, and as purchased by single authorities.

We have added in Itron’s four / five (it takes credit for the original Amaresco entry) to the original 10, which leaves us with a representative list of 14. These are highly notable deployments, ranked in order.

And Chicago may yet rocket up the table, when the original scope of its lighting upgrade is complete, and it starts on the rest of the 270,000 it has earmarked for ‘smartness’.

1 | FLORIDA (state), US – 500,000 (by Itron)
2 | MONTREAL (city), Canada – 250,000 (by Dimonoff)
3 | OKLAHOMA (state), US – 250,000 (by Itron)
4 | LOS ANGELES (city), US – 220,000 (by Signify)
5 | QUEBEC* (province), Canada – 200,000+ (by Dimonoff)
6 | PARIS (city), France – 200,000+ (by Itron)
7 | GEORGIA (state), US – “hundreds of thousands” (by Telensa)
8 | JAKARTA (city), Indonesia – 140,000+ (by Signify)
9 | JAMAICA** (country), Jamaica – 110,000 (by Itron)
10 | BUENOS AIRES (city), Argentina – 100,000+ (by Signify)
11 | BIRMINGHAM (city), UK – 100,000+ (by Telensa)
12 | ESSEX (county), UK – 100,000+ (by Telensa)
13 | HERTFORDSHIRE (county), UK – 100,000+ (by Telensa)
14 | CHICAGO (city), US – 76,000+, stretching to 270,000 (by Amaresco / Itron)

* excludes Montreal
** country-wide deployment

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