Citylight.net

Streetlights typically run on fixed schedules, burning at the same level whether a street is busy or empty. Citylight.net is changing that in several German municipalities with smart street lighting controllers that respond to movement. Each luminaire connects over LTE-M with a prepaid 1NCE SIM, giving municipalities reliable data transmission and fixed connectivity costs for ten years, with no additional data charges.

Background 

Citylight.net (SIA Teliko), founded in 2009 and headquartered in Bergi, Latvia, develops smart street lighting and IoT control solutions. Globally, its technology controls more than 600,000 individual luminaires and over 1 million luminaires through segment-based control systems. Its current project modernizes street lighting across multiple German municipalities using luminaire controllers with integrated motion sensors. The project aims to reduce street-lighting energy consumption by approximately 30% while maintaining the lighting quality, visibility and public safety required by cities.

The Challenge 

Every luminaire has to report telemetry, alarms, energy data and sensor events reliably, across very different street layouts. Street lighting is a long-lived asset, so connectivity costs need to stay predictable for years without recurring data-fee administration. Citylight also needed to deploy at scale without building separate local network infrastructure, and to cut the time and cost of commissioning, where manually mapping each luminaire adds effort to every install.

1NCE Solution 

Each Citylight controller connects over LTE-M with 2G fallback using a 1NCE prepaid SIM. The lifetime model makes per-luminaire communication costs fixed and predictable, removes recurring data-fee administration, and matches the long service life of street-lighting assets. Because the solution runs on cellular connectivity, deployments scale without any separate local network.

On top of that connectivity, Citylight's controllers use automatic geolocation: once installed and powered up, each luminaire reports its own position, enabling plug-and-play setup without manual mapping. Reliable connectivity also underpins Citylight's AI-based collaborative adaptive lighting. Sensor events from each controller travel over the 1NCE network, allowing neighboring luminaire groups to respond together: detected movement lights the way ahead of pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles, then lighting drops back to energy-saving levels once movement has passed.