In this insight piece, Daniel Noiseux, Dimonoff’s Executive Vice President, examines whether cellular networks alone can reliably manage a city’s smart lighting system. He argues that even the largest urban environments will present coverage gaps, or “blank spots,” that leave connected lighting nodes without a signal, making a wireless mesh backhaul network a more dependable alternative for citywide control.
Noiseux outlines several advantages of mesh networking over pure cellular connectivity, including its ability to route around physical obstacles, improve communication quality as node density increases, extend range from gateways, automatically commission new nodes, and self-repair when a node goes offline. He notes that monthly cellular costs per node can be pushed below $0.04 USD, but that this figure does not account for the risk of technology obsolescence.
Because municipal lighting assets are typically expected to remain in service for 15 to 20 years, the article warns that carriers’ 4G and 5G support could reach end-of-life within 10 to 15 years, and that carriers were unwilling to commit beyond roughly six years in negotiations with the company. Replacing cellular-dependent hardware to keep pace with future network generations could add an estimated 50 percent to the total purchase cost of a lighting control system, compared with a mesh-based deployment.
Noiseux concludes that a properly designed wireless mesh network gives cities greater reliability, security and flexibility for managing large-scale lighting systems, while helping avoid the recurring replacement costs tied to cellular network sunsets.