Belgium has a unique status in the history of public lighting; its highway network is so extensively illuminated that it has famously been described as “visible from space.” This legacy dates back decades, driven by a philosophy of maximum safety and visibility for drivers. However, in an era of urgent climate action and rising energy costs, keeping thousands of kilometers of highways fully lit at full power is no longer sustainable.

In 2016, street lighting across Belgium consumed more than 700 million kWh annually, with roadway and highway lighting accounting for a substantial portion of this total. These installations traditionally relied on conventional sodium lamps and static operation, offering limited visibility into failures, no adaptive control and high maintenance costs. At the same time, Belgium faces strong societal and regulatory pressure to reduce CO₂ emissions, improve road safety and modernize critical infrastructure.

The Flemish grid operator, Fluvius, started a journey to modernize approximately 400,000 streetlights through a multi-vendor procurement framework. Beyond reducing the carbon footprint and energy use, another primary goal was to improve maintenance operations, replacing manual scouting with real-time grid visibility to maintain Belgium’s high safety standards more efficiently.

Managing lighting on highways presents a different set of challenges compared to a dense city center.

• Linear geography: Highways stretch for hundreds of kilometers, often through remote areas. Traditional RF mesh networks, which rely on “hopping” from pole to pole, can be difficult to maintain over such long distances and require installing and powering expensive gateways.
• Critical safety: On high-speed roadways, lighting failure is a safety hazard. The operator needs instant awareness of outages to dispatch crews immediately.
• Interoperability: With a project scope of this magnitude (potentially up to 400,000 controllers for this specific framework), Fluvius could not afford to be locked into a single proprietary system. They required a solution that could integrate multiple vendors into one cohesive management platform.

To solve the connectivity challenge of linear infrastructure, Fluvius selected a cellular-based approach. Flashnet, in collaboration with Itron, proposed a solution leveraging NB-IoT technology.

Lighting control and monitoring are managed via Itron’s software platform, integrated with Flashnet’s IoT layer. This allows utilities to visualize, monitor and control roadway lighting assets in real time, using map-based interfaces to manage groups, segments and individual luminaires. By using existing cellular towers, the system ensures that even a lone light pole on a remote stretch of highway remains connected and controllable.

The hardware implementation features inteliLIGHT® Zhaga controllers, which are mounted directly onto the luminaires. This “plug-and-play” approach allows for rapid deployment, essential for minimizing lane closures and traffic disruption during installation.