Sydney, Australia – Sydney-based National Narrowband Network Company (NNNCo), the 100 percent IoT telco, has signed a contract with technology provider Wellness TechGroup, to provide IoT network coverage to 70,000 smart streetlights in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The project will cover 200 square kilometres and provide smart street lighting to more than 1.3 million people, improving community and road safety, and reducing carbon emissions by up to 80%. This initiative will also establish an infrastructure-based network that can accommodate other smart city initiatives.
NNNCo, Wellness TechGroup and their partners will replace Montevideo’s existing lighting system with LED technology and roll out a powerful and interoperable remote management system, which is designed to reduce carbon emissions by 31,500 tonnes of CO2 per year, a decrease of approximately 80 percent. The project will also improve the quality of public lighting service and provide greater efficiency and operations management to the whole city.
The Smart Street Lighting project will see the deployment of 70,000 new streetlights with LED technology using Wellness TechGroup’s CMS WeLight Manager software, LoRaWAN® Actis Nema 7 LPC nodes and NNNCo’s LoRaWAN® network. Smart Street lighting provides a unique opportunity to improve public and road safety, energy efficiency and customer amenity via network and application management software and the integration with other urban smart applications like waste management and water conservation.
NNNCo, Australia’s leading LoRaWAN® network operator with a carrier licence, provides a scalable IoT network service and platform to enable enterprise-grade solutions for businesses and the government. LoRaWAN®, now an international ITU standard, is a proven, scalable low-power, wide-area networking protocol technology that wirelessly connects devices to the internet and manages communication between end-node devices and network gateways.
Rob Zagarella, NNNCo CEO and Co-Founder, said: “This is a milestone contract in the establishment of NNNCo’s LoRaWAN® network as one of the world’s leading networks for smart streetlight use cases and we hope to facilitate similar projects in Australia and in other countries in the near future,” explained Mr Zagarella.
“This is a great example of Australian technology driving global Sustainable Development Goals,” added Mr Zagarella.
Wellness TechGroup and NNNCo will be able to provide added services to the city of Montevideo as the contract signed include the opportunity to bring third parties customers across the same gateways into the LoRaWAN network. The Australian network provider will be able to service customers across the whole city, using the NNNCo N2N-DL data aggregation layer and the NNNCo N-Tick device interoperability programme.
Wellness TechGroup will roll out 70,000 Actis Plus Nema 7 LCP nodes for remote control of light points. The Actis Plus Nema 7 nodes will connect with WeLight Manager TALQ certified CMS, powerful and leading-edge software that will provide real-time information on all the data from the intelligent public lighting service. Luminaries become effectively a data-enabled lighting server, true central nodes and form part of a smart city IoT ecosystem, beyond lighting.
David Garcia, Wellness TechGroup CEO, said: “We have deployed more than 300 smart lighting projects worldwide, where we are already managing almost 1 million points of lights in municipalities remotely.”
“Our technology must help reduce the costs, improve the efficiency and environmental impact and provide a better service, but it must also serve citizens by improving their day-to-day. Montevideo will now have a more versatile lighting system, capable of responding to events and unforeseen events, facilitating a feeling of more security on the streets.”
Montevideo’s new public lighting system will be one of the largest smart street lighting projects over LoRaWAN to date. LoRaWAN technology was selected to ensure a low total cost of ownership, advanced technical attributes, high security, flexible network deployment models, optimisation of battery life and the ability to access a fast-growing ecosystem of other solutions.
“I congratulate NNNCo on this massive LoRaWAN deployment, which exemplifies how 2021 has truly been the year of scale for the LoRaWAN standard,” said Donna Moore, CEO and Chairwoman of the LoRa Alliance®. “This project demonstrates the strong value of LoRaWAN, first in its flexible deployment for street lighting, and second, as a means to positively impact the environment, people’s lives and business efficiency. I look forward to following the progress of this project and seeing the positive impact that NNNco and LoRaWAN bring to Montevideo.”
NNNCo and Wellness Techgroup are investee companies of Enzen, a global knowledge practice that provides consulting, technologies, governments, non-governmental organisations and not-for-profits. This contract shows the synergies of both companies in the areas of IoT, smart cities and sustainability.
