During the remote plugfest held in September 2021, Flashnet’s technical team was challenged to integrate with several other TALQ-certified smart city and smart street lighting solutions, to test the TALQ standard compliance, the interoperability approach of each company and the standard itself.

Today, cities that consider switching to intelligent lighting control need more than a basic smart street lighting solution. Information, control and reduced energy consumption are all important, but interoperability has become the only way to keep up with global changes.

“Since our first street lighting control implementation back in 2012, we have focused on open communication standards and open integrations. We have never truly understood closed systems and we believe that supplier-locked situations are simply unrealistic and impossible to manage in the fast-paced technological environment that creates today’s smart cities” said Lorand Mozes, CEO of Flashnet.

In this context, TALQ aims to facilitate the adoption of smart city and smart street lighting applications, by creating a common language between different systems. This way, the city managers should be able to install and coordinate synergistically not only different applications, but also more than one provider for a certain city service.

To consider the plugfest event a success, several CMS (central management software) systems must work with network gateways, controllers, and sensors from multiple vendors. The plugfest, organized periodically by TALQ, created a real-life scenario in which 8 other TALQ member companies besides Flashnet (BeeZeeLinx, Dhyan, Itron, LuxSave, Paradox Engineering, Schréder, Sicom and Telensa) were challenged and tested in terms of integration capabilities.

Testing the TALQ standard is a crucial step for the connected lighting community, providing proof of actual interoperability and building trust towards the customers. Together with the other companies, Flashnet’s R&D engineers worked for over two weeks with the TALQ team to prove its flexibility and interoperability-by-design. By using real life use cases for both individual and segment controllers, inteliLIGHT successfully tested its integration capabilities with all participants, both northbound (software) and southbound (hardware).

Following the rigorous testing processes, Flashnet’s development team was able to validate our protocol implementation, but also succeeded to come up with concrete proposals to improve the TALQ documentation and standard.