A leading University from Spain chose inteliLIGHT’s smart lighting solution to reinvent the student experience on campus

Flashnet, together with Ingenia, will support a leading University from Spain in making the jump to a smart and innovative Campus. The installation of inteliLIGHT LoRAWAN compatible controllers will encourage students to engage safely and more deeply with the campus life, while helping the university manage costs and support the efficient use of resources.

The initiative uses already proven Smart City technologies, integrated by Cisco to create the Smart Campus. At the same time, the campus is the ideal stage ground for testing smart city initiatives and a great way to experiment IoT solutions before scaling them up. This Smart Campus pilot project will bring technology and innovation closer to students, who will be able to get immersed in the actual implementation of a smart campus project.

With the objective of bringing technology closer to student life, the University decided to install inteliLIGHT smart street lighting control. The inteliLIGHT smart streelight controllers provide lighting grid awareness and detailed control, using LoRaWAN – a long range, low power radio communication technology often used in IoT platforms and smart city projects.

What made LoRaWAN the best choice for this smart campus project was its long range signal range and minimal power requirements. One base station covers up to 15 km line-of-sight in areas with low urban density. LoRaWAN can be considered an enabler for smart cities – it offers flexible, reliable, and versatile connectivity and there are a wide of smart city applications that can be supported by LoRaWAN coverage.

As far as the security needs of this project are concerned, these will be handled by Ingenia, a company specialized in information and communications technology, that focuses, among others, on cybersecurity, open data and smart cities.

Because the University’s interest to recover, restore and conserve buildings of historical significance, the aesthetic aspect played an important role. Therefore, for preserving the architectural value of the campus, it has been opted for in-pole controllers. The system uses existing luminaries, which means a fast installation without the need to replace them and with no significant civil works.

Through ON/OFF control, dimming and real-time reporting, the inteliLIGHT solution will support the campus in reducing operational costs and improve the student experience. The administration can optimize the campus’ electricity and lighting usage, maintaining a high level of security around the campus.

This will empower facilities teams to problem-solve and respond quickly to any maintenance requests. At a larger scale, it will bring significant benefits in terms of sustainability by shrinking the university’s carbon footprint.

However, lighting control is only one step towards a smart campus. Modern smart city projects take into account the possibility to integrate more than one smart application. Cisco took on the challenge to integrate all the University’s campuses into one consolidated network, aiming for a connected campus network and an unified management infrastructure. As inteliLIGHT provides native integration with Cisco systems and Flashnet is a Cisco Preferred Solution Partner, the difficult integration challenge was solved right from the start.

Thanks to Cisco, Ingenia and inteliLIGHT, the campus will become a smart city platform for further innovation by creating new services that share a common technology infrastructure. Therefore, the implementation of the smart lighting solution could lead to the integration of other applications like smart parking, trash management, CCTV cameras and even intelligent classrooms and collaborative learning spaces.

In addition to the clear benefits, this initiative will serve as an example to other University campuses that want to differentiate themselves across Spain and Europe.

„We are proud to be part of this smart campus initiative. inteliLIGHT was the solution of choice for outdoor lighting control due to its proven flexibility and integration capabilities. But this is about more than street lighting control, we are proud to be a part of the effort leading to modern higher education.” said Lorand Mozes, CEO of Flashnet.