More than 30 million smart street lights by 2023, predicts study

A research report from internet of things (IoT) analyst firm Berg Insight is predicting bright times for the smart street lighting industry with its installed based set grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.5% from 2018 to reach 31.2 million by 2023.

The Smart cities: connected public spaces study notes that the smart street lighting market is currently undergoing significant transformation and is now entering a new era of competition where the success of suppliers will be determined by their ability to establish themselves as competitive providers of communications and management platforms for smart city devices.

While various proprietary RF mesh or star networks currently account for the majority of smart street lighting installations, the adoption of low-power wide-area (LPWA) technologies such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and long range (LoRa) is growing fast, particularly in the European and Asian markets.

In terms of regions, Berg found that Europe was the leading smart street lighting market accounting for nearly two-fifths of the installed base. Describing the market as being characterised by a higher degree of utility ownership of street lighting assets, Berg added that the North American market has seen a more scattered uptake of smart street lighting, but was nevertheless home to several of the world’s largest deployments.

North America accounted for around 305 of the global installed base in 2018. The study also found that the rest of the world accounted for 31% of the global installed base in 2018, with the Chinese market constituting a large part of these installations.
 
The world’s leading smart street lighting supplier is UK-based Telensa, which accounted for 14.4% of the global installed base of connected endpoints in the third quarter of 2019. Included in the top three are Signify and Sensus, the latter becoming a leading player in the market in 2017 through its acquisition of the major smart street lighting supplier SELC. Together, these three suppliers accounted for a third of the global installed base of individually controlled smart street lights.

US-based Itron – at the heart of a project by the City of London to light up its historic territory with more than 15,000 luminaires – is also a leading player in the networking segment, having acquired Silver Spring Networks in 2018.

Other leading smart street lighting suppliers identified in the study included Rongwen Energy Technology Group from China; CIMCON Lighting, Acuity Brands, Current, LED Roadway Lighting, and DimOnOff from North America; Lucy Zodion, and SSE from the UK; Reverberi Enetec from Italy; Flashnet from Romania and Telematics Wireless from Israel.

Commenting on the study, Levi Ostling, IoT analyst at Berg Insight, said: “Finding new ways to monetise data from a variety of smart city sensors and devices will be essential for smart street lighting suppliers in the next couple of years to avoid becoming mere vendors of commoditised hardware.”