Shift towards fully-integrated lighting for brighter infra

Pervading every area of an individual’s life – at home, work, on the road and in public places, lighting is pivotal in the development of smart cities. By 2030, there will be nearly 70 billion light points in the world, many of which will be connected – sensor nodes in networks capable of acquiring, sending and receiving data.

Sumit Padmakar Joshi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Signify Innovations India Limited talk about how the lighting player is contributing to modern cities.

How do your products add more value for making better smart cities?
We are developing people-centric blueprint for lighting and Internet of Things (IoT) services, with respect to smart cities. Connected LED lighting is a key enabler for smart cities and has the potential to enhance overall quality of life and ensure sustainability.

The primary function of public lighting is to provide energy efficient, quality light to enhance public safety. However, in future, a city’s lighting infrastructure will also offer enormous potential to be part of a city-wide network capable of acquiring data and delivering information and services to and from millions of devices. In this way, it could help enable smart city services improve lives.

Talk about the latest smart lighting trends.
LED penetration and emergence of connected lighting are key trends in the sector with respect to smart cities.

Thanks to government initiatives such as Street Lighting National Programme, LED penetration in public street lighting sector has notably risen over the last three to four years. With the expansion of the IoT ecosystem, we anticipate a shift towards fully integrated lighting system.

Our Interact IoT Platform that connects seamlessly with smart controls, networks, devices as well as apps, offer customisable and tech-enabled lighting experience. The platform supports our company’s strategy to deliver new data-enabled services as value expands from lighting products and systems to services. Interact delivers new insights to help customers drive operational efficiencies and take more effective decisions.

Discuss about your latest product or innovation.
We have already installed 29 million connected light points worldwide and plan for every new LED product of ours to be connectable by 2020. This growing number of connected light points, sensors and devices, as well as systems, can collect large volumes of data for which Interact was designed. The scalable, cloud-based platform uses sophisticated and modern data management and data processing capabilities, including machine learning, to bring sense to all manner of data. It also offers a growing suite of licensed open application program interfaces (APIs), which will foster innovation from third-party developers, development partners and customers.

The connected lighting systems available now are – Interact City for public space lighting, roads, streets, pedestrian areas, parks and plazas; Interact Landmark for architectural lighting; Interact Office for offices and commercial buildings; Interact Retail for large retail and food stores and Interact Sports for stadiums.

Last year, we also announced the launch of our Light Fidelity (LiFi) technology in which high quality LED lighting provides a broadband Internet connection through light waves. LiFi is a two-way, high-speed wireless technology similar to WiFi but uses light waves instead of radio waves to transmit data. Our office luminaires enabled with LiFi technology provide broadband connection with a speed of 30 Mb per second (Mb/s) without compromising lighting quality.

City’s lighting infrastructure will offer enormous potential to be part of a city-wide network capable of acquiring data and delivering information to and from millions of devices.
Sumit Padmakar Joshi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Signify Innovations India Limited

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