Smart City

Smart City Sentinel

Smarter Cities, Well Lit: Cleaner, More Sustainable, Intelligently Run

By Arti Loftus

Smart Cities and Smart Regions continue to grow, and in the U.S. market investment in new infrastructure and bringing together physical and digital worlds is maturing from hundreds of smaller and often disparate projects into more comprehensive systems.

In the U.S., after decades of discussion, public/private partnerships are now funding and addressing the escalating demands of a fast-growing population wishing to live, work, drive, and interact. City and county officials, supported by state and federal government programs, are looking to the Internet of Things to enable the cutting-edge intelligence and flexibility necessary to help cities use resources more efficiently – to improve everything from the quality of air and water to transportation, energy and communication systems.

By some analysts’ estimates, governments around the world will invest $40 trillion over the next 20 years to upgrade their infrastructure to benefit from the IoT, and as 21st century infrastructure becomes more intelligent and connected, citizens will benefit from improved management of resources and the many positive social and economic impacts that the IoT can help deliver.

The adoption of smart city applications is being driven from several directions. In some cases, municipalities are seeking to become IoT enabled by developing comprehensive “smart city” plans and issuing vendor RFIs for a number of services. This has been a traditionally slow moving and often delayed process. In other cases, municipalities are selecting a single initiative such as smart lighting to start with in order to stake a claim in the smart city arena. Another approach is collaboration between network operators and application providers to deploy high density IoT network coverage for an application and then they work with the municipalities to deploy additional applications under the existing network. This approach is rapidly gaining traction with networks deployed for first mover applications such as water metering allowing municipalities to then rapidly deploy smart parking, waste management, pest management and public safety solutions in the same coverage areas.

“High density public LoRaWAN networks are being deployed across municipalities today to support IoT applications with millions of connected end points such as water and gas metering,” said Bruce Chatterley, CEO at Senet. “These networks are built with abundant capacity, allowing them to be used for a variety of applications, providing municipalities with the benefit of having access to secure, multitenant, multi-application opportunities over the same wireless infrastructure.”

Earlier this month, to advance smart city application growth, U.S.-based network technology and services company Senet announced a partnership with Wellness Telecom, headquartered in Spain, with offices in Orlando.

Wellness has deployed IoT solutions in more than 400 cities and partnering with Senet will allow them to expand to the United States market by leveraging Senet’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) connectivity and device management services.

Wellness Telecom offers smart city street lighting, smart waste and recycling collection, energy and water consumption tracking, as well as analytics solutions.

"We determined LoRaWAN is the optimal communication protocol for our IoT solutions. While we have experience setting up LoRaWAN network infrastructure in other countries, it is not a core function of our business. For the US market, we wanted to partner with a stable, reputable leader to help streamline the deployment of our solutions and, ultimately, provide a quicker ROI for our customers," said David Garcia Ternero, Founder and CEO of Wellness Telecom. "Senet is a perfect fit for our growth objectives. Our strategic partnership allows us to easily connect our full suite of Smart City products to Senet’s network and to easily scale as our customer base grows."

Senet operates the largest carrier-grade public LoRaWAN network in North America, provides coverage and connectivity readiness in over 80 countries and a full suite of network planning, deployment and management services to support on-demand network expansion based on the unique geographical and application-specific connectivity needs of its Smart City customers and partners. This includes long-range connectivity, dense indoor and outdoor coverage, and geolocation services.

“Smart City solutions present an enormous opportunity for municipalities to achieve social, economic and environmental benefits,” said Bruce Chatterley, CEO at Senet. “We look forward to working with Wellness Telecom as they collaborate with municipalities to create the network backbone for connected city-wide services and accelerate the deployment of their Smart City applications across the United States.”

Wellness Telecom for around a decade has been implementing solutions in IoT, Cybersecurity, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. The company currently has projects in over 60 countries and specializes in large multi-vertical projects that cover the design, deployment and operation of solutions including Safe Cities, Clean and Efficient Cities, Smart Destinations and Connected Industry.

The company has expanded significantly in recent years, and now has offices across the globe in Spain, Mexico, the United States, Sweden, Germany and Australia.


Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Ken Briodagh
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