UST is always looking for opportunities to create lasting impact in communities. Facing the need to reduce energy consumption and costs and improve road safety, The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads wanted to upgrade its legacy street lights with smart street lighting. We provided vital product engineering expertise, working in partnership with Quantela and Schréder, to bring DTMR's vision to life.

Hi, I'm Mark Cullum. I'm Director of Product at Quantela. We began working with our partner, Schréder, and DTMR (Department of Transport and Main Roads) in Australia in excess of two or three years ago. Like many cities and municipalities around the world, they were looking to upgrade their street lighting infrastructure to LEDs to reduce energy consumption and provide operation and maintenance saving. UST is our primary engineering partner at Quantela. The team is a global team, and really, the speed and the agility of the team is really important to us, and that's why we engaged with UST.

My name's Christian. I'm a solutions architect at Schréder Australia. The deployment of a smart lighting system will improve a community because of the reduced carbon footprint and enhanced road safety.

One of the primary challenges that the end customer, DTMR, faced was the physical geography and that they were deploying their street light infrastructure over hundreds of kilometers, thousands of kilometers in fact, and controlling that reliably.

DTMR was also very keen to have a solution that would be very easily deployed and also maintained over a long timeframe. So these were all considerations that we had to incorporate in our solution design and that we had to meet in order to be successful with this project.

Our initial solution we're deploying today is a vertical street lighting control management system. That is a piece of hardware that attaches to the street lights. Our device is a wireless control unit, so it's critical infrastructure, but then it becomes a smart city solution, on each and every street light.

We see that a lot of cities find themselves under cost pressures in order to reduce energy consumption, asset management costs, and so on. So it's a key consideration for cities, how to bring that down. Street lighting is a low hanging fruit in that regard. It is often a very large proportion of the energy consumption of a city, and any reductions that can be achieved there have a strong impact on reducing carbon footprint, reducing CO2 emissions, and electricity costs.

The primary benefits to the community, and to the public as a whole, are energy savings. Simple as that. You upgrade a city to smart street lights, straight away you've got a huge CO2 benefit.

I think it's a great example of how the smart lighting system becomes the backbone for a smart city and further applications in that area, so we have the statewide platform with all the connected lighting assets.

There are hundreds of millions of street lights out there. If street lights fail on highways and street lights go dark in any sort of volume, that's really bad for the public. So specifically for street lighting, the use case is clear, energy saving and operation and maintenance saving, but also public safety. In the event of a traffic accident, for example, using a control system such as ours, the street lights can be turned on full brightness. So if there’s a blue lights incident, for example, the lighting manager that's responsible for the lighting at that point in time generally will get notified by the police and those street lights can be turned on full brightness.

We have found that an improved lighting service actually reduces the rate of accidents on the road.

At UST, we're proud that our product engineering expertise has made Australia's largest smart street light deployment possible. It's set to reduce accidents and save Queensland cities up to 30% on energy costs.

It's great to be involved in a project like this where we had so many parties come together and deliver a superior solution to reduce energy consumption, to reduce CO2 emissions, the carbon footprint, to deliver a better lighting service to the community and improve road safety. It's a great feeling to have been able to deliver this and to have been part of this.

The team at UST provide and have the ability to turn around new features within our hardware and firmware very, very quickly. What makes me proud is when we get feedback from our customer and any country partner that our product just works.