When inserted into the street lighting grid, these gadgets will create multi-gigabit wireless networks

Israel's Siklu and Holland's Signify have a shared vision to turn our street lighting infrastructures into wireless networks. By integrating the two they could save economies a fortune on installation time and money and usher in the age of the Internet of things in record time. 

Petach Tikva-based Siklu, a millimeter-wave (mmWave) networking specialist, is to integrate its knowledge of gigabit wireless access (GWA) with the lighting and aesthetics knowhow of Eindhoven's Signify. Together they could to create a network grid that can illuminate city dwellers in both senses of the word.  

Brightsites, smart city 

This combination of Siklu's MultiHaul multi-gigabit wireless connectivity technology and Signify's BrightSites portfolio has been included into a portfolio dubbed Broadband luminaries. 

Signify's BrightSites system will set up 4G and 5G small cells from which Internet of Things (IoT) will support traffic monitoring, security and digital inclusion initiatives.

Municipal wi-fi will ensure that everyone gets residential broadband access. 

The‘li-fi’hybrid could significantly wean us off our fibre dependency. This could speed up the city-wide roll-out of secure and reliable multi-gigabit wireless connectivity in a fraction of the time and money that a fibre run would cost.

With market validation in the bag, the two companies have agreed to expand the collaboration to jointly develop and commercialise solutions for street lighting infrastructure.