Omniflow: 5G for Smart Street Lighting

03.05.2022 by Pauline Batzer

IoT streetlight from Omniflow serves as charging point for two e-vehicles

Smart City meets Green Tech. Omniflow’s smart IoT lamp pole provides light, WiFi access, measures traffic flows, and many other services, all powered by sun and wind and using Telekom’s 5G technology.

Conventional street lights provide light, consuming a considerable amount of energy. Generating this energy releases up to 1.3 tonnes of CO2 per year. Not so with the smart IoT lamp pole manufactured by a Portuguese company, Omniflow. Omniflow’s state-of-the-art Smart Pole supports all kinds of practical uses such as traffic monitoring, smart parking, WiFi access, 5G small cells and many more. And thanks to solar modules, a wind turbine and integrated energy storage the smart pole can operate even during power network fails, being resilient and very energy-efficient. Compared with conventional street lighting, that enables operators to reduce their energy costs by over 90 percent.

A further reason for the growing global success of Omniflow smart poles is that the lights can be equipped with a wide range of IoT functions. Telekom supports this sustainable Smart City solution with LTE and 5G small cell modules for functions such as WiFi reception and data transmission to the cloud. Omniflow already has more than 2,000 smart poles in use around the world.

Smart Zebra Crossings for More Safety

Local authority customers are especially enthusiastic about the smart crosswalk function for safer zebra crossings. This is how they work: cameras and sensors in the Omniflow lamp pole detect the presence of a pedestrian and power the lights to its maximum power while also turning on the road lighting and the pole signage. In the near future the computer vision will be able to analyze traffic at the pedestrian crossing and in the event of an accident risk the Omniflow lamp pole can activate light and sound alerts to warn drivers and people using the zebra crossing. A connected car might also receive these automatic warnings or even an order to stop. Smart street lighting is also in demand for smart parking applications, for traffic analysis and for counting flows of people.

5G Increases Option Numbers

Smart lamp poles are also already in use as WiFi access points, surveillance cameras, EV charging points and for air quality measurement. Thanks to the cloud connection, operators are able to monitor and control the lights’ many and wide-ranging functions and evaluate the data collected. Edge computing, for example, is used to evaluate videos locally and relay only relevant content to the cloud or to the operator’s data center, thereby reducing data volumes transmitted. Interactive displays on the smart poles could in the future prove useful as directional signposts or for conveying information of other kinds.

Digital Urban Development in Spain

Accessing, analyzing and reacting to data remotely, Omniflow smart IoT lamp poles offers local authorities in particular many benefits, and it does so thanks to Telekom’s powerful 5G connectivity. In Gijón, for example, the port city in northern Spain uses five Omniflow smart poles along the beach promenade to measure air quality and analyze pedestrian flows. Over the past two covid summers the smart poles have helped the municipality to keep track of footfall and close or reopen sections of beach on the basis of usage. Data collected is also helpful for traffic planning.

More and more cities and private operators all over the world are relying on these smart poles from Portugal. This year a further thousand street lights, mainly in Europe and the U.S., should help take sustainable smart City projects forward.

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Pauline Batzer

Project Manager IoT

Since 2015, Pauline has been passionate about the variety of the IoT world. She has gained a lot of experience with the Internet of Things from different perspectives by working with customers, partners, and start-up companies. For the Telekom IoT blog she writes about technological trends, products, and innovations in the Internet of Things which are implemented in different industries.