The Smart City Protocol Continues to Spread in Many Countries

In order to simplify investment decisions for cities, the TALQ Consortium has developed a global interface standard to connect and manage heterogeneous outdoor lighting and other smart city applications from different hardware and software vendors. Integrating the Smart City Protocol into their solutions allows smart lighting and smart city application providers to achieve interoperability and offer open systems to cities, globally.

Reasons for TALQ members for integration

“Citégestion is specialized in monitoring platforms for cities. We quickly noticed, that linking our solution with a rather large number of street lighting suppliers was a challenge. It became even more true when it embraces smart cities’ concerns, with an even larger number of device providers.”, reports Gautier Perraut, Technical Director at Citégestion. “Therefore, from the very beginning, we always thought that standardizing the communication protocol between the node providers and the software editors was key to strengthening the adoption of smart solutions by cities.”

John Fox, Managing Director at Lucy Zodion adds “As a member of the TALQ Consortium, with TALQ version 2 Gateway Certification, we are helping cities unlock vendor tie-in with a proven industry open protocol standard. Our Ki. solution has been tested against the Certification Tool, making it compatible with other smart city platforms – providing city leaders with the ability to build a future-proof, scalable and multi-vendor smart city.”

The benefits of membership are summarized by Antonio Royo, General Manager UVAX Concepts, as: “Implementing a protocol with feedback from many experts from different companies gives a competitive advantage in the market. Having a solution with an integrated standard helps members’ solutions to be considered in various public tenders and assures our solution complies with the latest state-of-the-art definitions.”

Brian McGuigan, Itron’s Smart City Lead said, “We believe that robust and interoperable standards are key to giving cities the confidence needed to adopt Smart City solutions at scale, without fear of vendor lock in, and have been strong advocates of the TALQ Consortium since its formation. Since certifying in 2017 we have been using the TALQ v1.0 standard to manage over 3 million lighting points deployed globally, and are excited about the extended functionality and improved interoperability offered by the TALQ v2.0 standard.”’

The Consortium continues to evaluate interoperability with its rigorous two-stage certification procedure. The Test Tool Software is regularly updated and extended with new feature requests. During the certification assessment, the tool is used to generate protocol reports, which are reviewed by the expert Certification Work Group. All products which successfully pass this procedure are listed as being ‘certified products’ on the TALQ website, which remains the only official channel for approved TALQ-compatibility.

Certified TALQ-Compliant Products (TALQ Specification Version 2):

Central Management Software (CMS):

• CityLinx from BeeZeeLinx, France
• City Vision from Capelon, Sweden
• Smart Firefly from Uvax, Spain
• Flashnet IoT platform from Flashnet, Romania
• SLV CMS from Itron, USA
• SmartLinx from LED Roadway Lighting, Canada
• LuxSave Streetlight CMS from LuxSave, Sweden
• CityMESH CMS from SICOM, Chile

Outdoor Device Network (ODN) / Gateway:

• Citybox from Bouygues, France
• Ki from Lucy Zodion, United Kingdom
• SLV Gateway from Itron, USA
• Owlet IoT from Schréder, Belgium
• Access Point System from Smartnodes, Belgium
• CA-13 from Uvax, Spain
• Trilliant TALQ Gateway from Trilliant, Canada
• Witti TALQ Gateway from Witti, France
• CITY GATEWAY from SICOM, Chile