Annual revenue from smart street lights will grow at compound annual rate of 31 per cent to reach $1.7 billion in 2026, reckons ABI Research.
The analyst house said street lighting programmes will continue to focus on replacing conventional lamps with LED lamps through 2020, a period that will see only around 20 per cent of LED street lamps qualify as “smart” through integration with lighting controls systems.
This imbalance will correct itself after 2020, and by 2026, central management systems will connect to over two-thirds of all new LED street light installations, said ABI Research.
Adarsh Krishnan, principal analyst at ABI Research, said: “Smart street lighting vendors such as Telensa, Telematics Wireless, DimOnOff, Itron, and Signify have been the most successful in benefiting from their cost-optimised products, market expertise, and aggressive commercial approach.
“There are additional opportunities to be had by smart city suppliers leveraging street pole infrastructure by hosting of wireless connectivity infrastructure, environmental sensors, and even intelligent cameras. The challenge is finding a feasible business model that encourages deployment of multi-sensor solutions cost-effectively at scale.”
ABI Research said smart street lighting has been deployed for certain priority applications. In order of priority, these include: remote scheduling of dimming profiles based on seasonal changes, time shifts, or special social events; metering individual street light energy consumption for accurate usage-based billing; asset management to improve maintenance planning; and sensor-based adaptive lighting.
Regionally, street lighting deployments are unique in a vendor and technology approach, as well as end-market requirements, it said. In 2018, North America was the leader in the space, accounting for 31 per cent of the total installed base, followed by Europe and the Asia Pacific.
In Europe, non-cellular low-power wide-area (LPWA) network technologies have a dominant share of smart street-lights today but will cede share to cellular LPWA technologies as NB-IoT based devices become more commercially available in the second quarter of 2020.
By 2026, the Asia Pacific region, driven by deployments in China and India, will have the largest share of smart streetlights, accounting for over one-third of global installations, said ABI Research. China and India have ambitious LED street lamp retrofit programmes, it noted, and are also building local LED component manufacturing facilities to lower lamp costs.
Krishnan commented: “In India and China, LED streetlights have seen a very low penetration of lighting control systems due to a nascent domestic solution vendor ecosystem and international vendors that are unable to adapt their solution to meet local market requirements for innovative yet low-cost products.”
Low-cost solutions based on cellular LPWA network technologies followed by non-cellular LPWA network technologies will witness the most growth in the APAC region, accounting for a market share of 48 per cent and 36 per cent respectively, said ABI Research.
