Australian telco to help Montevideo cut emissions by 80%

National Narrowband Network Company (NNNCo), a Sydney-based LoRaWAN operator and IoT solutions provider, has partnered with Spanish company Wellness TechGroup to provide IoT network coverage to 70,000 smart streetlights in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo.

The project will cover 200 km² and provide smart street lighting to more than 1.3 million people, reducing carbon emissions by 80% and establishing an infrastructure-based network that can accommodate other smart city initiatives.

The project will see the deployment of new streetlights with LED technology using Wellness TechGroup’s WeLight technology, LoRaWAN Actis Nema 7 nodes and NNNCo’s LoRaWAN network. The installation will help improve public safety and energy efficiency with the use of network and application management software and the integration of smart applications for waste management and water conservation.

By replacing the older lights with LED technology and a new remote management system, the system will help reduce carbon emissions by 31,500 tons of CO₂ per year, a decrease of approximately 80%. The project will also improve the quality of the public lighting service, benefiting the whole population of the city with greater efficiency and operations management.

Rob Zagarella, NNNCo CEO and co-founder, said, “This is a milestone contract in the establishment of NNNCo’s LoRaWAN network as one of the world’s leading networks for smart streetlight use cases and we hope to facilitate similar projects in Australia in the near future.

“This is technology that makes cities greener, smarter and better to live in,” said Zagarella.

The 10-year contract signed with the City of Montevideo includes the opportunity for Wellness and NNNCo to bring third-party customers across the same gateways into the LoRaWAN network. The Australian 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 program.

Wellness TechGroup will roll out 70,000 smart streetlights with Actis Plus Nema 7, the node for remote control of light points, equipped with Nema 7 fast connection, a network analyser, data input from external sensors and adaptive lighting capacity.

The Actis Plus Nema 7 nodes will connect with WeLight Manager, a software that will provide real-time information on all the data from the intelligent public lighting service. The systems become a data-enabled lighting server, true central nodes and form part of a smart city IoT ecosystem, beyond lighting.

David Garcia, Wellness TechGroup CEO, said, “We have deployed more than 300 smart lighting projects worldwide, where we are already managing almost 1 million points of lights in municipalities remotely.”

NNNCo and Wellness Techgroup are investee companies of Enzen, a global knowledge practice. This contract shows the synergies of both companies in the areas of IoT, smart cities and sustainability.