UK based smart lighting manufacturer, Telensa has been chosen for smart lighting projects by both Darwin and Palmerston in the Northern Territory.
Both projects follow a decision by the Northern Territory Government to transfer the control of street lights to councils.
Darwin will replace close to 10,000 lights on its street and public lighting network with Telensa PLANet LED street lights wirelessly connected by Telensa in what Telensa says will be one of the largest council-run projects of its type in Australia. Palmerston will install some 500 lights.
In both cities the lights will be controlled by the Telensa central management system hosted in Australia by Amazon Web Services.
In August 2018 Telensa announced that the Sunshine Coast Council would deploy its PLANet system for a 24 month pilot in the Maroochydore City Centre development and in nearby Evans Street.
More applications to come
Telensa founder and chief commercial officer, Will Gibson, said the company was looking forward to working with both cities on low-cost smart city applications enabled by the new lighting networks, but no details were given.
In February IoTAustralia reported that the City of Darwin released a for-comment draft of its #SmartDarwin strategy saying it provided a blueprint for the city to become a digitally innovative council and contribute to establishing Darwin as a smart, liveable, productive and sustainable capital city.
The council identified the current Switching on Darwin project, — being delivered in partnership with the Northern Territory and Australian Governments — as the first phase of a focus on smart technology to create efficiencies in service delivery and provide improved data analysis.
Shortly afterwards it announced that Telstra had been appointed to deliver a suite of smart technologies in the city centre such as LED smart lighting, smart parking, Wi-Fi, CCTV and video analytics.
Telensa describes PLANet as “an end-to-end intelligent streetlighting system consisting of wireless nodes connecting individual lights, a dedicated wireless network owned by the city and a central management application. Telensa claims it to be the world’s most popular connected streetlight system, with more than 1.7 million lights connected.
