Netherlands-based lighting firm Signify is to integrate LTE and 5G into a new range of ‘broadband luminaires’ for the smart cities market. Signify has signed a deal with smart-city broadband provider Siklu to bundle the Israel-based firm’s ‘multi-haul’ ‘multi-gigabit’ hardware (branded ‘MultiHaul’). The new broadband line is part of Signify’s BrightSites portfolio.
The pair said they will also cooperate on “innovation, development, and commercialization of pervasive multi-gigabit wireless connectivity for digital cities”. A statement said: “Signify’s new BrightSites solution is converting streetlights into a wireless connectivity grid which can facilitate a wide range of digital city services, such as IoT [for] security and traffic monitoring, 4G/5G small cells, [and]… municipal Wi-Fi and residential broadband access.”
Sikhlu’s MultiHaul line is its third-generation of point-to-multipoint solutions operating in the 60 GHz millimeter wave unlicensed V-band, and fifth-generation of V-band products. It is compatible with Facebook’s Terragraph backhaul technology, which works at 60 GHz. A statement said: “[The solution] reduce[s] dependency on fiber… and enable[s] municipalities to create a wireless mesh network by replacing their luminaires with broadband luminaires.”
Signify is using Siklu’s MultiHaul N366 TG node. The pair said they have collaborated over the past year to develop the new BrightSites solution, and will expand the collaboration to jointly develop and commercialize solutions for street lighting infrastructure.
Khalid Aziz, head of connectivity solutions at Signify, said: “We aim to radically accelerate the transition to smart cities by enabling the lighting infrastructure as a primary platform for cost-effective and scalable broadband connectivity. With our combined solution, we overcome significant hurdles for the creation of dense networks by ensuring every light point acts as a data hub. This reduces time and cost, and most importantly, it improves the environmental impact as compared to legacy means.”
Ronen Ben-Hamou, chief executive at Siklu, said: “Siklu products are already enabling a wide range of urban and industrial services that require gigabit broadband access. With the increasing demand for high-speed internet connections everywhere… we share Signify’s vision of utilizing the lighting infrastructure as the connectivity grid of the future.”
