It’s the holiday spirit at machineQ. Who wouldn’t be in a city like Philadelphia with so many things to do during the most wonderful time of the year? Two favorite hotspots are just a few blocks from their offices in Center City – City Hall’s Dilworth Plaza, with its giant Christmas tree; and the Christmas Village at LOVE Park.

Visitors to the City enjoy both attractions from morning well into the evening, and with the sun setting earlier and earlier with each passing winter day, the City of Philadelphia’s Streets Department wants to make sure these areas are well lit. So, MachineQ worked with the City to install inteliLIGHT®, a smart lighting solution that allows them to remotely control and manage the lights for the 2017 holiday season and into 2018.

“The machineQ smart lighting system has added so much to the festive mood around City Hall this holiday season,” said Richard Montanez, Deputy Streets Commissioner for Transportation. “But the capabilities give us other huge benefits: we can ensure appropriate lighting levels, better gauge energy consumption, and respond more quickly to power outages.  It’s a great way to ring in the new year.”

The project uses the LoRaWAN^TM compatible network the machineQ team built in Philadelphia earlier this year. LoRaWAN is a global communications standard similar to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but one that uses significantly less power and is specifically designed to wirelessly deliver small amounts of data over larger geographical areas. Flashnet, a supplier of street lighting controls and management systems, attached their inteliLIGHT® smart controllers to the street lights, as seen in the images below.

“After hosting the LoRa Alliance™ meeting earlier this year, machineQ have visibly increased their efforts to develop and promote LoRaWAN™ in the US. We are very proud to be part of that effort and that inteliLIGHT® has been trusted by Comcast to be installed in the iconic US city of Philadelphia.” Said Mr. Lorand Mozes, CEO of Flashnet®, the company developing inteliLIGHT®.

Here is a diagram of how the machineQ network helps enable solutions not just for controlling lighting, but also for a host of other needs:

“We’re thrilled to be able to work with the City of Philadelphia, our hometown, on this turnkey street lighting solution that has the capability to easily be scaled to stretch across an entire metropolitan area. From street lights and road signs, to critical underground infrastructure, LoRaWAN networks like the one we’ve built in Philadelphia are an effective and cost-efficient way for forward-thinking municipalities to meet their smart city objectives.” writes MachineQ in their press release earlier today.