Smart street light poles are being piloted in Beijing's Dongcheng, Haidian, and Tongzhou districts, and 146 sets of them have officially debuted along Hangzhou's West Lake. This holiday season, it seems street light poles are also pulling out all the stops to celebrate the Republic.
Beyond their elegant appearance, these smart light poles integrate multiple functions, including lighting control, LED screens, 5G base stations, and smart alarms. By combining multiple poles into one, they make roads cleaner and become a beautiful part of the city's landscape.
In fact, smart street light poles were piloted in various locations as early as 2016, but never gained widespread popularity.
This year, with the advancement of 5G base station construction and the rollout of over 30 local policies, smart street light poles have sprung up at intersections in Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and other regions.
On August 8, Guangdong Province launched its first provincial industry standard for the smart street light industry. This is undoubtedly a game-changer for the smart street light pole industry, which has faced complex economic conflicts and challenges in implementation.
According to relevant forecasts, my country's smart street light pole market is expected to reach over 30 billion yuan this year and 100 billion yuan by 2022.
What setbacks did the smart street light pole industry encounter during the sluggish years of 2017-2018? What "magic pill" will lead to its recovery in 2019?
Faced with a massive market that could reach 100 billion yuan by 2022, how will telecom giants, traditional lighting manufacturers, and new cross-sector players such as security companies seize market share?
Can smart street light poles-the capillaries of smart transportation-grow rapidly, healthily, and smoothly, ultimately connecting them to the arteries of the entire smart city? Through research and field visits, this article attempts to answer these questions.
From kerosene lamps to LED lamps, street lights have undergone a long evolution. With the development of IoT technology, street light upgrades are shifting from optimizing "lighting" effects to "intelligent" sensing and control.
"Smart" means streetlights can use their own sensing to intelligently perform tasks like automatically turning on and off, adjusting brightness, and monitoring the environment, thus eliminating the high cost and low flexibility of wired manual control.
Compared to traditional streetlights, smart streetlight poles not only illuminate the road for pedestrians and vehicles, but also serve as base stations to provide citizens with 5G networks, act as the "eyes" of smart security to maintain social safety, and can be equipped with LED screens to display weather, road conditions, advertisements, and other information to pedestrians.
2016 is considered the first year for the implementation of smart streetlight poles in my country. At the beginning of the year, ZTE Corporation piloted the first Blue Pillar smart streetlight pole in the Shenzhen Industrial Park. In April, the Shaanxi Provincial Government, in collaboration with China Tower Corporation and ZTE, piloted smart light poles. In December, 20 high-end composite streetlight poles manufactured by Shanghai Sansi were unveiled on Zuoanmen West Street in Beijing. Suddenly, news of smart streetlight pole pilots in various regions resonated nationwide.
The development of smart light poles in China is almost synchronized with that in other countries. Starting in 2015, US telecommunications giants AT&T and General Electric partnered to install cameras, microphones, and sensors on 3,200 streetlights in San Diego, California, enabling functions such as finding parking spaces and detecting gunshots. Los Angeles also introduced acoustic sensors and ambient noise monitoring sensors to streetlights to detect vehicle collisions and directly notify emergency response departments. The Copenhagen municipal government in Denmark planned to install 20,000 energy-saving streetlights equipped with smart chips by the end of 2016.
Smart light pole technology is already relatively mature. Functionally, smart light poles incorporate intelligent lighting, communication base stations, microclimate monitoring, video surveillance, Wi-Fi coverage, LED information displays, public address systems, and charging stations. These features can now be customized to meet the needs of homeowners. The goal is no longer to simply overload features, but rather to achieve platform integration.
Overall, smart light pole solutions encompass four layers: perception, network, platform, and application. The four layers work together. For example, when a local fire occurs, the perception layer can quickly transmit fire data via the network layer to the platform layer, enabling the fire application layer to determine whether an emergency response is necessary.
However, the nascent smart streetlight pole initiative encountered setbacks in 2017-2018, and progress in its implementation remained stagnant.
ZTE Corporation's Energy MKT Solutions Director, Wang Dongxu, noted at the time, "Who will use them, who will build them, and who will operate them is a huge question."
The cost of a single smart light pole is as high as 30,000 to 80,000 yuan, while the profit model remains unclear, and operational authority is unclear. For example, there are no reference projects or models to address the question of whether the telecom operator or the city developer will take the lead.
In addition to operational challenges, coordination of interests is also a serious issue. Smart streetlight solutions involve diverse areas such as meteorology, transportation, urban construction, and advertising management, all under the management of different national agencies and departments. Communication and coordination between operators and these different departments present numerous challenges.
Dou Linping, Secretary-General of the China Illuminating Engineering Society, once analyzed that smart streetlights require strong support to become a complete solution.
Furthermore, due to the collective stagnation of smart light pole promotion projects, referenceable industry specifications and standards have yet to emerge.
Smart streetlight poles, riding the wave of the "Internet of Things" concept, have just been implemented but have already encountered setbacks. They urgently need new momentum, a strong promoter, and a set of industry-leading specifications and standards.
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