25 Apr 2019

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’.