BrightSites Smart poles for Smart Cities

There is no shortage of posts on this blog looking at small cells and other infrastructure on lamp posts and smart poles. Here is another one from Signify, the new company name of Philips Lighting.

The BrightSites website boldly proclaims:

BrightSites smart poles by Signify turbocharge cities’ infrastructure

The digital transformation of public spaces is accelerating rapidly. Yet most components of a city’s digital backbone are insufficient to meet the modern connectivity needs of today and tomorrow. The BrightSites smart poles from Signify, offer an all-in-one solution – providing a broadband connectivity, 4G/5G and WiFi infrastructure, as well as platform for number of IoT applications. And all this, while maintaining the aesthetics of the urban environment.

Elegant and multi-functional design: BrightSites offer an elegant and aesthetically pleasing multi-functional smart poles, making it a matching addition to your cityscape. BrightSites poles are available in various heights, colors, styles, enabling integration into any streetscape with optimal visual impact. 

Easy deployment and scalability: Mobile operators can deploy dozens or hundreds of cell sites quickly and easily, making it possible to densify network capacity and coverage with a minimal disruption.

Digital pathway: Signify BrightSites is the digital pathway of the modern city. Using the ubiquity of a city's existing street lighting infrastructure, BrightSites poles deliver 4G/5G, Wi-Fi, LoRa, Sigfox, fiber hubs, and a possibility to accommodate wide range of IoT applications.

Energy Efficiency: Philips LED lighting provides a cost-effective, low-maintenance alternative to traditional street lighting – an important consideration for cities.

Our smart poles are highly suitable for dense urban areas, historic or transit centers, corporate and college campuses and any other areas with coverage- or capacity-challenged environments.

The Signify website has variety of solutions showing different models. We already looked at a very early evolution of this in the post here as we looked at the H-series Slim pole here.

BrightSites H-Series Slim Pole

• integrated broadband connectivity, up to 4 radio units and 2 basebands from various vendors
• a wide variety of digital technologies and IoT capabilities (Wi-Fi, cameras, and sensors)
• Suitable for urban areas in historic or contemporary styles
• wide range of customization for lighting requirements
• transforms  streetlight into assets

Back in 2019, Signify had already announced that BrightSites smart poles have already been installed in San Jose, US and Hospitalet, Spain. Surely they have been installed in a lot more places by now. 

Finally, here is a video explaining the need for smart poles.



Related Posts:

• Connectivity Technology Blog: Is Li-Fi Gaining Momentum as an Alternative Beyond 5G?
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Leveraging Streetlights for the Digital Future
• The 3G4G Blog: 5G Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) Enhancements in Rel-17
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: NEC's 5G Antenna-equipped Smart Street Lighting to be Trialled in Tokyo
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: TIP Webinar on Open Optical & Packet Transport (OOPT)
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog - 5G CrowdCell: World's First 5G OpenRAN Small Cell
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Huawei's 5G Book RRUs Start Delivering On Their Promises
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: LuxTurrim5G smart light pole concept
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Small Cells on Hong Kong Lamp Posts
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: 5G Small Cells on 'Smart Poles' in Denver
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: BSNL bringing 'Smart Telecom Poles' to India with help of Nokia
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Ericsson's Invisible Sites: Urban Case Studies
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: ZTE's 4G / 5G Street Lights
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: KDDI to test 5G with base stations built in Street Lights
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Vodafone UK improving coverage with Phone Boxes, Mini-masts & Manhole Covers

Small Cells at Mobile World Congress 2017 (#MWC17)

Mobile World Congress was big and busy, as always. There were lots of interesting demos, technologies and much more. While I was only able to look at a few demos, here is my summary of the small cells related info that I managed to see or came across on social media.

Ericsson and Philips have been working together for a while so its no surprise they were showing their new connected street lighting model. You can see this from my picture above.

Disruption at the network edge panel: @sprintnews densifying its network with thousands of small cells #mwc17 pic.twitter.com/daFoMUCz0a

— CCS (@CCS_multipoint) March 1, 2017

Sprint has already mentioned earlier that they will be rolling out more small cells and they were conveying the same message at MWC. Their rival T-Mobile says that they have 1000 small cells right now but will have 5/6000 by the end of the year.

IP Access had a nice booth and it was good to see that their CEO Malcolm Gordon and CTO Nick Johnson both managed to get their message across that 2017 will probably be a big year for Small Cells.

Vodafone introduced the "CrowdCell" concept last year, this year they continued to build on that story. The CrowdCell uses macro for backhaul. I generally refer to this as In-band backhaul (IBBH) and have written about this here. While they have already shown Indoor CrowdCell and In-car CrowdCell before, this year they were showing the Flying CrowdCell. You can see a video of that here (in Spanish) and a non-flying version here. This is slightly similar to the Airmast concept by EE.

Hidden in a corner at the Vodafone booth was a pre-commercial quad band femto by Parallel Wireless. If you look at the form factor, its no different than a single band femto from couple of years back.

Parallel Wireless also had a presence on many of their partners booths (picture above from KMW booth). TMN magazine has a feature on them and I embed their video below.


China Unicom is deploying 500 Radio Dots from Ericsson in Beijing.

Cellnex was showing how their small cells could be used for Smart Cities and Urban deployments. They have recently signed contract with JCDecaux and expects to deploy between 200,000 and 500,000 small cells 🙃

Acceleran was showing small cells on 3.5GHz CBRS band.

The Indian mobile operator Reliance Jio, which recently set a record for fastest 100 million subscribers (in 170 days), will be deploying Airspan small cells. This should be a massive project for Airspan.

Finally, there were quite a few 5G conceptual demo's. The picture above is from Intel stand. Due to 5G not yet defined, people were either using 28GHz or 60GHz. Regardless of what they were demonstrating, they would claim it to be 5G.

Apologies to other vendors I have missed.

There were also some good presentations at the Small Cell Forum networking area. The link for them is below and I will also be sharing some more of them in the coming weeks.

Related links:

• Mobile World Congress 2017 Small Cell Event Report - ThinkSmallCell
• Speaker presentations from MWC - Small Cell Forum
• Look back and forecast of Small Cells
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Flying Small Cells are here...

Small Cells in the Lamp posts

This lamp post does look a bit weird and ugly but it could be the future. 'SmartPoles', developed by Philips in conjunction with Ericsson delivers LED lights and LTE powered mobile broadband. According to the official press release:

With cellular data traffic expected to grow 9 times by 2020, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, and current telecoms infrastructure struggling to respond to this demand, Philips SmartPoles are enabling seamless mobile wireless 4G/LTE connectivity, with the small cell technology from Ericsson housed in the poles to enable increased data capacity in the telecoms network.  Philips SmartPoles were specifically designed and tested to accept FCC licensed wireless mobile network operator equipment. This enables an alternative deployment methodology for 4G LTE broadband services which will connect each pole through a fiber link to its core network.

Back in February TTP in partnership with IP.Access, Quortus and Freescale demoed another concept of small cell on the lamp post. The case study on Freescale's website says:

TTP’s new eNodeB based on the QorIQ Qonverge® BSC9131 addresses these challenges. It fits into a photocell socket of a standard lamp post, providing the quickest possible installation without any modification to the lighting column or its power supply. The solution incorporates LTE Access Point software from ip.access and has been demonstrated with the Quortus ECX Core evolved packet core. It is targeted at 50 metre cells, supporting up to 32 active users at downlink rates of up to 100 Mbps.

TTP have also made an interesting video on this:

This conceptual lamppost above was conceived as a part of Oakland Innovation Project in 2013. While its good, its not ambitious enough as it talks about just WiFi for connectivity.

On the other hand, V-Pole (Vancouver Pole) concept by Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland shows what may be possible in the distant future. It is a wireless data, electrical vehicle charging, neighbourhood bulletin board post that is also an LED lamp post that could eliminate some of that clutter. I think it will still take quite a few years before technology can make this possible. Press release from 2012 available here.

I look forward to the day when street lights and lamp posts can do more than simply provide lighting and be a hub for providing connectivity and much more.

Related posts:

• Small Cells on the Lamp posts and other street furniture
• Huawei's Lampsite