Fully connected street lights
Adlershof’s ICE-Gateway GmbH help municipalities save money
Merely giving light does not by any means exhaust the potential of the street lamp. At least that is the opinion of the founders of ICE-Gateway GmbH from Adlershof. They want to assign lamps a major role in the smart city of the future.
Upgraded with a remote control gateway, street lamps are turned into network nodes. For instance, to transfer traffic data and ecological data from connected cameras and sensors. Or to transmit data to connected vehicles and pedestrians. And, of course, to become more efficient themselves.
Street lights retrofitted with LED lights can be accessed from a distance and dimmed if traffic or lighting conditions require it. The conversion sounds costly. But founder Ramin Mokhtari and his partner, professor Gerd Ascheid, whose regular occupation is directing the Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems at the RWTH Aachen University, want to enable municipal governments to gain access to efficient LED technology through contracting.
They have chosen a fortunate moment. EU regulation states that only energy-efficient light sources may be used as of 2015. For treasurers in cities and towns, vast expenditures lie ahead. Unless the Adlershof solution is given a chance: “The savings achieved through our intelligent systems outweigh the entire operative costs,” according to Mokhtari. In the course of the standard ten-year contract duration, not only would the saved power costs refinance the investment in LED lamps, control and communications technology as well as underlying cloud services, but also the complete transfer costs and contracting fees.
The company founders do not only advocate interconnection on the streets – they are themselves very well connected. Their partners include the Deutsche Telekom M2MCC (Machine-to-Machine Competence Centre), various LED producers and service providers, the RWTH Aachen University, and, since January, the High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) which participates in ICE-Gateway with venture capital. Settling down in the Technology Park Adlershof was a conscious decision which, to the team, is also all about good connections. With the help of close partnerships with renowned universities, research institutions and partners in the industry they want to develop an enormous market potential: across the EU, 30 million lamps face retrofitting.
The experts from the High-Tech Gründerfond say the start up’s chances are good: through the integration of lighting into the machine- to-machine networks of telecommunication companies, ICE Gateway is well-placed for further services in the smart city sector.
By Peter Trechow for Adlershof Special