After examining hardware in the first part of his series on future readiness, Dimonoff founding president Bernard Têtu turns to network connectivity, a layer that many smart city projects treat as an afterthought even though it can determine how long a system stays useful. Many connectivity standards are robust enough to last for decades, he notes, but others become obsolete within six to eight years, so cities should research their options carefully, get carrier commitments in writing, and weigh the total cost of ownership over the system’s lifespan. He specifically cautions against building on aging mobile standards such as 2G and 3G, which carriers are phasing out worldwide.
Because street lighting networks often become the backbone that other smart city applications run on, adequate bandwidth is just as important as the connectivity standard itself. Têtu lists questions cities should ask vendors: can new modules and applications be added to the existing network, how are firmware updates delivered over the air and how long do they take, and what are the limits on message frequency and size as the network scales.
Some vendors charge recurring network fees for the life of the system, while Dimonoff’s wireless mesh network is built into the hardware itself, with no ongoing network fees apart from cellular gateways. Têtu concludes that low-band mesh networks paired with intelligent edge devices can perform well, but their scalability, interference immunity, security, latency and over-the-air upgrade capabilities should all be validated before a large-scale rollout.