The situation
Montréal operates one of the largest municipal lighting networks in North America. In 2016 the City committed to converting the entire inventory to 3000K LED and, at the same time, to placing every fixture under remote control. The conversion covers roughly 85,000 cobra-head luminaires and some 47,000 decorative fixtures spread across 19 boroughs.
The complication was not the scale alone. The City awarded lighting hardware and control hardware to different suppliers, so the management platform had to operate controllers from more than one manufacturer without fragmenting the operations team’s view of the network.
What was deployed
Every luminaire received a controller that reports status, energy consumption and faults. Controllers form a wireless mesh that relays to gateways, and gateways feed the Dimonoff | SCMS platform, where lighting groups, schedules and dimming profiles are defined.
Crucially, SCMS manages third-party controllers alongside Dimonoff nodes. Montréal’s network includes controllers from Current, powered by GE and from Telematics Wireless, all administered from the same interface.
Results
The City published a target of 35% lower energy costs and 55% lower maintenance costs. The maintenance figure is the one that surprises most municipal buyers: it comes less from the LEDs than from the control layer, because a fault is reported by the fixture itself rather than discovered by a patrol or a citizen call.
Why it matters for your network
If your city already owns controllers from a previous supplier, the Montréal deployment is the relevant precedent. Multi-vendor management is not a roadmap item here, it is running in production at a scale of more than 130,000 endpoints.
Within the next five years, citizens will benefit from improved street lighting, better suited for the metropolitan way of life. Significant savings will ensue as the City will reduce energy consumption by 35% and maintenance costs by 55%.