Upgrading public street lights to LED lights alone is not enough to achieve desirable energy savings. Therefore networked, adaptive street lighting solutions have emerged as a leading smart city application. Although replacing existing street lights with LED lamps could cut down cities' electricity costs by 50%, networking these LEDs can deliver additional energy savings and bring down payback period to less than 6 years. The connected street lighting solution, which is enabled by IoT and cloud, provides an ideal platform for multiple smart city services including lighting control and energy optimization, traffic control and smart parking, environmental monitoring and analysis, public safety and security, EV charging, and digital signage and communication.

Frost & Sullivan has been continuously tracking the evolution of outdoor lighting – from conventional sodium-vapour lamps to networked LED lighting. We have explored the driving forces and challenges to implement connected street lighting infrastructure along with a number of applications that can be hosted through street lights, discussing use cases, benefits and potential business models. However, for the purpose of market sizing and assessment, Frost & Sullivan considers a lamp post to be ‘smart’ if it is equipped with LED lamps and intelligent controls along with other hardware units that cater to one or more use cases for smart city applications. This study does not cover non-LED lamp post as they are not suitable for implementation of connected street lights or smart lamp posts. The cost of connected street lighting infrastructure include the cost of lamp post, hardware units, software application for remote management, and associated services including hardware installation, deployment services, and software implementation cost.

Frost & Sullivan has estimated the global connected street lighting and smart lamp poles market to expand at a rate of 33.1% from 2017 to 2024. The market was evaluated at $1954.4 million in 2017. In terms of volume, the global connected street lighting and smart lamp poles market are expected to grow at a rate of 40.3% from 2017 to 2024.

In terms of geography, the global connected street lighting and smart lamp poles market is segmented in as: North America (US & Canada), Europe, APAC ( India, China, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia & New Zealand), Middle East and Africa, and rest of the world (Commonwealth of Independent States and Latin America).