Choosing a smart city system means looking closely at how open it really is, according to Dimonoff founding president Bernard Têtu. On the hardware side, cities benefit from platforms that accept sensors and controls from different vendors and that remain compatible with legacy street lights, since municipalities rarely replace an entire lighting network at once and need to phase modern equipment in gradually.
Network connectivity is another layer where flexibility pays off. Meshed Wi-Fi can work well in a small commercial downtown area, but rolling it out city-wide is often too costly and impractical, so Têtu recommends combining technologies such as cellular, wireless mesh, LoRaWAN and power line networking depending on the use case. Scalability also matters: a system should be evaluated on what happens when a city needs to connect tens of thousands of additional street lights, and edge computing can help by letting devices process data locally before sending results back, reducing bandwidth needs.
On the software side, openness means the platform can manage devices from multiple vendors, support different hosting models such as SaaS, on-premises or hybrid deployments, and share data through well-documented, open APIs. Montreal’s use of digital parking signs integrated over the same wireless mesh network, controlled remotely through platform APIs, is offered as an example of what this interoperability makes possible.
No system is perfectly open, Têtu concludes, but some solutions offer meaningfully more flexibility than others. Municipal decision-makers are encouraged to identify which dimensions of openness matter most for their own priorities before selecting a smart city vendor.