The following are news announcements made during the past week:
PRESS RELEASE:
Citelum, Cisco Collaborate on Lighting Improvement, Smart-City Platform in New Mexico
Following Mayor Richard Berry’s initiative, the City of Albuquerque, NM and Citelum have collaborated to create “EnvisionABQ”, a unique plan to relight Albuquerque. The custom “Lighting Master Plan” has been designed based on a complete inventory of city-owned assets and thorough analysis of the city’s urban landscape. It takes into account local heritage, public safety goals, and land usage to provide large-scale lighting level improvements – ensuring the right light, for the right application, for every location across Albuquerque.
Citelum will invest $22 million to upgrade all city-owned lights within one year, maintain the upgraded system for 14 years, and guarantee cost savings for energy and maintenance while delivering improved lighting performance and service levels over the term of the contract.
The energy and maintenance savings generated by this performance-based contract will go towards the implementation of a Smart City architecture for Albuquerque. This platform is built around Cisco Kinetic for Cities, a network of street level sensors and edge analytics, and a suite of use cases and solutions they can enable. Cisco Kinetic for Cities has 34 global deployments in large cities and small towns including Las Vegas and Kansas City, Missouri in the U.S.
“Cisco is proud to work with Citelum to provide the Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform to enable city officials to make data-driven decisions to help improve public safety, energy efficiency and the quality of life for Albuquerque’s residents,” said U.S. Public Sector Senior Vice President Larry Payne.
Life expectancy and efficiency of LED lighting far exceeds that of the current HPS streetlights in Albuquerque. While generating 58% guaranteed energy conservation and reducing light pollution, the improved lighting performance will enhance the visibility and even coverage of surveillance video captured by the Albuquerque Police Department(APD) Real Time Crime Center (RTCC).
The LED upgrade alone is estimated to reduce CO2 emissions by 123,000 tons over the life of the project (equivalent to the annual energy usage for 13,000 single-family homesor 1.81M gallons of gasoline consumed). Proprietary monitoring and management technologies, such as the Citelum CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), MUSE®, will allow for faster repair times and exact location targeting; eliminating time spent searching for non-operational streetlights, further reducing the City’s carbon footprint while streamlining the process of replacing outages.
“EnvisionABQ is the result of Mayor Berry’s vision for the future, as well as a tremendous collaborative work effort between the City’s and Citelum’s teams to engineer a custom Lighting Master Plan and implement an innovative performance-based contract for the next fifteen years. We are very proud to provide our expertise to ensure that the City of Albuquerque receives the full benefits of an optimized lighting performance correlated to significant carbon footprint and energy consumption reduction, as well as smart city services,” said U.S. General Manager Pierre Devilliers.
The agreement between the City and Citelum is based on measurable and enforceable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that guarantee a higher percentage of operational streetlights (98% at all times), and faster response times in repairing outages (48 hours for most standard repairs).
With over 2.5 million streetlights under management, Citelum will apply its global lighting expertise and industry best practices to ensure that the City of Albuquerque receives the most reliable and efficient LED and smart technology upgrade. By selecting Citelum, Albuquerque has partnered with a company trusted by other major cities such as Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Mexico City.
PRESS RELEASE:
Wellington City Council Selects Telensa for Smart Street Light Management System
Telensa, the market leader in connected street lighting and Smart City applications, has announced that it has been selected by Wellington City Council to deploy its PLANet intelligent streetlighting system. The project will start in November 2017 and is due for completion in June 2018.
Telensa PLANet is an end-to-end intelligent street lighting system, consisting of wireless nodes connecting individual lights, a dedicated wireless network owned by the city, and a central management application. The system pays for itself in reduced energy and maintenance costs, improves quality of service through automatic fault reporting, and uses streetlight poles for supporting hubs for smart city sensors. With more than one million lights connected, Telensa PLANet is the world’s most popular connected streetlight system.
“We’re delighted to be working with Wellington City Council to deliver a more efficient, more resilient streetlighting system that will be responsive to citizens’ needs for decades to come,” said Will Gibson, Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Telensa. “And we’re looking forward to working together on low-cost smart city applications, enabled by the city’s new lighting network.”
PRESS RELEASE:
Connectivity Challenges Threaten to Derail Logistics Sector’s IoT Efforts, Says Immarsat
Unreliable communication networks may render logistics businesses unable to capture full value from the Internet of Things (IoT). This is according to the 100 global transport and logistics companies interviewed by Inmarsat (LSE: ISAT.L) the global mobile satellite company for its The Future of IoT in Enterprise – 2017 report.
The research suggests that while 96 per cent of transportation and logistics organizations believe that the success of their IoT deployments is based on reliable ubiquitous connectivity, many businesses are still struggling to access the connectivity they need. 40 per cent identified connectivity issues as one of the biggest challenges facing their IoT deployments, with only IoT skills (54 per cent) and the integration of IoT technology (43 per cent) seen as more problematic. Worryingly, 28 per cent stated that connectivity issues threatened to derail their IoT deployments before they had even begun.
Effective multi-modal, global logistics is reliant on the vast amounts of data gathered through IoT sensor technology, in order to analyze the behaviors of freight vehicles and cargo. However, without ubiquitous global connectivity these sensors are not always able to function, blunting the ability of businesses to efficiently orchestrate their supply chains.
Mike Holdsworth, Director of Transport at Inmarsat Enterprise commented: “In an increasingly inter-connected world, more cargo is moving through more geographies and more modes of transport to reach its destinations. This increasing complexity brings with it new risks and uncertainties, and creates a pressing need for logistics businesses to increase their visibility over the supply chain and make efficiencies, which is where IoT can help. If you can monitor cargo from its point of production to its point of delivery, you can cut down on wastage, understand and adapt levels of supply and ensure security. With a combination of IoT sensor technologies, such as Radio Frequency Identification tags, Bluetooth Low Energy and Low Power Wide Area Networks the movement of goods and things can become more efficient.
“However, the remote location of transport networks and routes clearly poses a challenge for logistics businesses. We can see from our research that gaps in connectivity are proving problematic to successful IoT deployment. Terrestrial communication networks may only provide sufficiently reliable connectivity solutions for IoT to function in parts of any given route, meaning vital assets such as trucks, trains, and ships, may enter communications blackspots when they are at most risk, in remote and potentially hazardous environments. For logistics businesses to access the full value of IoT, they must have reliable, continuous connectivity that enables them to constantly track their assets on a global scale,” he continued.
Holdsworth concluded: “Working with our partners, Inmarsat L-band services provide global satellite connectivity with up to 99.9% uptime for efficient, global solutions for fleet and cargo management across road, rail and sea. We combine our expertise in critical communications with cellular and terrestrial connectivity, LoRaWAN technology and data analytics platforms to enable the connected world. With our global connectivity solutions, we are enabling IoT projects to thrive, even in the most remote and hostile environments, providing transportation companies with the reliable end-to-end connectivity they require to move into the fourth industrial revolution.”
PRESS RELEASE:
Kerlink, Libatel Partner to Deploy IoT Network for Smart Agriculture in Lebanon
Kerlink (ALKLK – FR0013156007), a specialist and global leader in network solutions dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT), and Libatel, a leading provider of Information and Communications Technology in the Middle East and the Gulf, has announced the first IoT LoRaWAN smart-agriculture project in Lebanon: an intelligent network monitoring growing conditions at one of the country’s most famous vineyards.
The pilot project at Domain Chateau Kefraya, which began this summer, is generating data and information about the vineyard’s terroir, which includes topography, soil conditions, climate and sunlight that give wine grapes their distinctive character. At the project’s conclusion this November, the chateau will use the information to optimize wine-parcel classification over its 300 hectares of vineyards. By monitoring data coming from the vineyards, and permanently controlling the climate conditions, the maturity of the different types of grapes and other specific parameters, the chateau is able to allocate in anticipation the different parcels to the different productions, and especially selects the best grapes for high-end and renamed wine.
The customized LoRaWAN network deployment, which includes Kerlink Wirnet Station technology, is a proof-of-concept project involving Libatel and Ogero Telecom, Lebanon’s largest telecom operator, and will be part of Libatel’s bid to support Ogero’s deployment of a nationwide IoT network in Lebanon. Libatel, which is managing network operation and maintenance, data collection and software development, provided a dashboard tailored to the specific needs of Chateau Kefraya. The collected data is accessible from a computer or smartphone on a platform designed by the company.
Agriculture is Lebanon’s third-largest economic sector and includes a wide variety of terrain and climatic conditions.
“Lebanon is ripe for implementing smart-agriculture applications that provide our producers real-time information to better manage crop maintenance, water consumption and fertilizer and pesticide applications,” said André Chkeibane, country manager for Libatel Lebanon. “This improved efficiency supports sustainable-agriculture, while maximizing yields for producers, and this project with Chateau Kefraya will demonstrate specifically how the IoT can benefit Lebanese vineyards.”
“Kerlink’s low-power, wide-area network solutions can be customized for virtually any project, from nationwide deployments to small local networks and indoor applications,” said Stephane Dejean, chief marketing officer for Kerlink. “Working with Libatel on this proof-of-concept in Lebanon’s first smart-agriculture IoT deployment provides a concrete case study that illustrates the flexibility of our solutions, their simple rollout and the critical information they help collect and deliver.”
LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solution for wireless, bidirectional and secure connectivity of battery-powered devices in local, regional or national networks. The technology also enables device native geolocation using the radio network and geolocation-ready LoRaWAN gateways, like other references available in Kerlink’s portfolio. End users receive strong support from the LoRa Alliance, a global, 500-member-plus ecosystem of companies and organizations that share their experiences operating the network and that provide the different building blocks of successful end-to-end IoT solutions.
PRESS RELEASE:
Amplía Teams Up With Sigfox to Boost Merchandise Tracking
Amplía, OpenGate IoT Platform Provider, has joined Sigfox, a leading provider of low power and low cost connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT), to develop a comprehensive, global and massive solution for the monitoring of any type of merchandise.
Thanks to the combination of both technologies, companies can obtain the location of their assets in real time, view their location on a map, remotely collect all types of events and access information on all their devices instantly. It also allows access to the history of the data, something especially useful in making business decisions.
“Monitoring the status of assets in real time is key for the industry, since it not only facilitates the detection of incidents, minimizing their impact, but also helps to locate points of improvement that configure a more profitable experience for the client”, explains Rebecca Crowe, Spain Country Manager at Sigfox. “Thanks to the support and versatility of OpenGate, and our low-power, low-cost connectivity, we have been able to configure a solution that will significantly simplify and expedite merchandise management.”
These are the main functions to which the IoT solution of Sigfox and Amplía gives access:
• Visualize your routes in an exact way, being able to see the route the goods take and where they are at any time.
• Analyze online and in real time the routes to know if the marked route is being followed or if there is going to be delay.
• Control the quality of the supply chain by monitoring the temperature cycle and detecting vibrations, shocks or any other parameter that may affect the merchandise.
• Issue alarms in case the quality of the supply is not within the minimum parameters established.
Javier Martínez, director at Amplía: “This collaboration is key to Amplía, since it allows to offer solutions that until now were difficult to make due to the low return of investment offered to customers. The key points to enable these solutions are the cost savings in communications, the long life of the batteries, and the single rate without roaming. All these make possible adjusted costs in the devices and in the overall solution.”