Dimonoff Executive Vice President Daniel Noiseux weighs in on a Gartner market insight examining why communications service providers (CSPs) have struggled to capture a bigger share of smart city streetlight projects, noting that CSPs are named partners in only about 16% of such deployments to date, with system integrators and lighting manufacturers currently dominating the space instead.
The commentary argues that the underlying issue is less about who leads a project and more about whether the platform underneath it can adapt over time. A smart lighting platform needs to remain vendor-agnostic and future-proof, able to absorb new devices and data sources without locking a city into a single supplier or requiring custom coding for every addition.
That flexibility matters because a real smart city ecosystem is rarely built by one vendor. Street lighting, waste sensors, sewer monitoring, parking systems, and air quality devices typically come from different suppliers, and that fragmentation actually benefits municipalities by letting them choose the best product for each need rather than being tied to one provider.
Connectivity adds another layer of complexity, since technologies such as LoRa, NB-IoT, LTE-M, and Sigfox each serve different purposes with their own trade-offs in cost, bandwidth, and latency. For Dimonoff, a platform’s job is to accommodate all of these varying requirements while offering the API interfaces needed to integrate with the wider systems a city already relies on.