City of Harrisburg and Telensa trial smart city technologies

Telensa, a supplier of smart street lighting and smart city data applications, is working with the City of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA, to trial smart city technologies featuring smart sensors for traffic, air quality and waste monitoring.

The city deployed a Telensa smart street lighting system in 2016 and has used its physical and network infrastructure to roll out these additional smart technologies.

The additional sensors and capabilities have been deployed, including CA Traffic for traffic analytics, Libelium for air quality and FarSite for waste monitoring, and the data from these sensors is transmitted over Telensa’s proprietary UNB (Ultra Narrow Band) low power wide area network (which was installed in 2016, as part of the initial smart street light rollout) before being analysed and combined with existing lighting data and displayed on a smart city dashboard.

The city is also looking to test traffic adaptive lighting, which involves the dynamic adjustment of groups of streetlights by the central management system using real-time, raw traffic data received from a radar-based sensor; Telensa claims that this approach can reduce streetlight energy consumption by up to 30 per cent.

Prior to this latest rollout, Harrisburg and Telensa deployed more than 4,000 connected streetlights across the whole city, leading to ‘utility bill reductions of 60-70 per cent’.

“We’re thrilled to be collaborating again and deepening our relationship with the City of Harrisburg to utilise the connected streetlight infrastructure by adding smart city applications that bring more value to the city,” said Will Gibson, founder and chief commercial officer at Telensa. “We are excited to showcase the potential of this technology and the benefits it can bring to the citizens of Harrisburg and those of other cities around the world.”

“We live in a data-driven world, but we’re not going to monitor stuff just to monitor it - it has to make sense to the city!” said Wayne S. Martin Esq., Harrisburg’s city engineer. “That’s why we have chosen these smart city applications to open up endless possibilities for us to improve city efficiency and save money – the dollars can really add up.”