Australian IoT telco National Narrowband Network Company (NNNCo) and technology provider Wellness TechGroup are installing an IoT network for 70,000 smart streetlights in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The project will cover 200 square kilometres and provide smart street lighting to more than 1.3 million people, improving community and road safety, and reducing carbon emissions by up to 80%. This initiative will also establish an infrastructure-based network that can accommodate other smart city initiatives.

NNNCo, Wellness TechGroup and their partners will replace Montevideo’s existing lighting system with LED technology and roll out an interoperable remote management system, which is designed to reduce carbon emissions by 31,500 tonnes of CO₂ per year, a decrease of approximately 80%. The project will also improve the quality of public lighting service and provide more efficiency and operations management to the whole city.

The project will see the deployment of 70,000 streetlights with LED technology using Wellness TechGroup’s CMS WeLight Manager software, LoRaWan Actis Nema 7 LPC nodes and NNNCo’s LoRaWan. Smart street lighting provides an opportunity to improve public and road safety, energy efficiency and customer amenity via network and application management software and the integration with other urban smart applications such as waste management and water conservation.

NNNCo is an Australian LoRaWan operator with a carrier licence It provides a scalable IoT network service and platform to enable enterprise-grade technology for businesses and the government. LoRaWan, now an ITU standard, is a scalable low-power, wide-area networking protocol that wirelessly connects devices to the internet and manages communication between end-node devices and network gateways.

“This is a milestone contract in the establishment of NNNCo’s LoRaWan as one of the world’s leading networks for smart streetlight use cases and we hope to facilitate similar projects in Australia and in other countries in the near future,” said Rob Zagarella, NNNCo CEO. “This is a great example of Australian technology driving global sustainable development goals.”

Wellness TechGroup and NNNCo will be able to provide added services to Montevideo as the contract signed include the opportunity to bring third-parties customers across the same gateways into the LoRaWan. The network provider will be able to service customers across the whole city, using the NNNCo N2N-DL data aggregation layer and the NNNCo N-Tick device interoperability programme.

Wellness TechGroup will roll out 70,000 Actis Plus Nema 7 LCP nodes for remote control of light points. The nodes will connect with WeLight Manager Talq-certified CMS software that will provide real-time information on all the data from the intelligent public lighting service. Luminaries become effectively a data-enabled lighting server and true central nodes, and form part of a smart city IoT ecosystem beyond lighting.

“We have deployed more than 300 smart lighting projects worldwide, where we are already managing almost one million points of lights in municipalities remotely,” said David Garcia, Wellness TechGroup CEO. “Our technology must help reduce the costs, improve the efficiency and environmental impact, and provide a better service, but it must also serve citizens by improving their day-to-day. Montevideo will now have a more versatile lighting system, capable of responding to events and unforeseen events, facilitating a feeling of more security on the streets.”

Montevideo’s public lighting system will be one of the largest smart street lighting projects over LoRaWan to date. LoRaWan technology was selected to ensure a low total cost of ownership, technical attributes, security, flexible network deployment models, optimisation of battery life and the ability to access a fast-growing ecosystem.

“I congratulate NNNCo on this massive LoRaWan deployment, which exemplifies how 2021 has truly been the year of scale for the LoRaWan standard,” said Donna Moore, CEO of the LoRa Alliance. “This project demonstrates the strong value of LoRaWan, first in its flexible deployment for street lighting and, second, as a means to positively impact the environment, people’s lives and business efficiency. I look forward to following the progress of this project and seeing the positive impact that NNNco and LoRaWan bring to Montevideo.”

NNNCo and Wellness Techgroup are investee companies of Enzen, a global knowledge practice that provides consulting, technologies, governments, non-governmental organisations and not-for-profits.