iLEDea and CONNAX integrated Smart lights & UTIM™ modules to create secure smart city infrastructure in the heart of Karelia.
Pitkäranta is a former finnish town, located by the Ladoga lake in the Republic of Karelia. Republic of Karelia is one the few Euroregions in Russia. In contrary to popular belief, that Russia is falling in the dark abyss, there are people who want to change things for better and give their light to everyone around.
One of such companies are Energysaving ltd. and iLEDea Oy. Don’t be surprised, it’s common in Republic of Karelia to go over the border and register business or relocate it. These two companies are organised by people, who don’t see the borders between the countries and between ideas. We can openly say that they’re among one of the most innovative companies in Republic of Karelia and in Finland as well.
What is so innovative in their business? Well, from average russian cities they create Smart Cities. iLEDea and Energysaving with the help of CONNAX are building protected Smart City infrastructure. The whole infrastructure is emerging around one elegant solution — Smart lights acting as a full-scale LoRa network base stations. Installed all around, they cover the entire city with LoRa network that can be used as a transport for various devices.
Ingenious! Isn’t it? But there is one problem. It’s common to all LPWAN networks, including LoRa. Name of this problem is security supplemented by data integrity. Fortunately just at the moment when the companies were preparing to receive a government contract they met CONNAX and found out about UTIM™. The opportunities that it gave were exactly solving all related problems in easy and elegant way.
Ability to deliver a unique project value combined with enhanced security have convinced government to choose in favour of our proposition. Moreover companies themselves were happy to explore UTIM™ and UHOST™ for them, because it solved some of their production problems as a side effect.
If we’d take 1 IoT device — it’s easy and relatively cheap to configure with unique settings, but when it comes to massive deployments configuration becomes a very expensive (not cool) pleasure. That is why nowadays majority of device manufacturers tend to skip configuration, putting its’ reputation and security under huge risk.
CONNAX has delivered a software set consisting from UTIM™ and UHOST™ that automatically configures devices and securely connecting them to the platforms of iLEDea and Energysaving. Security and identity turned to be crucial for our partners, because as the next step they would like to share network that they created with other companies that can potentially utilise these capabilities.
Energy companies, city administration, water supply, local business and factories located in the city now can utilise LoRa network with all its benefits: efficient energy consumption, penetration abilities, low cost and of course security. The whole ecosystem will be further developed towards firstly using LoRa-WAN technology and then LoRa-Backscatter, all these enhancements will help to put IoT deliverability to a totally new level.
As a result of demanding but rewarding cooperation, we’re able to deploy transport network in Pitkäranta that can be used for various applications. We equipped smart city lights with UTIM™ modules, that protect every single session between device and server, from one end to another. To ensure that not a single watt of electricity is misused, we have also installed UTIM™ modules in 4 power plants, that serve as a mean of constant monitoring and bulletproof protection.
Energysaving has created a beautiful deployment map that can be found here (sorry website is available only in Russian) but you can easily get the main concept.
Altogether there were more than 1000 smart city LED lamps installed. From now on citizens and companies of Pitkäranta will be well light and can utilise all this amazing smart city network infrastructure that has emerged around them. And of course to ensure security and identity they all recommended to use UTIM™.
Today we see that hand in hand with governmental contracts, retail grows significantly with factories purchasing smart lights, in order to become closer to Industry 4.0. iLEDea and Energysaving are helping them, producing about 100 lights per day. Of course CONNAX will always be near to help with easy integration of security tools. We are here to give simple & secure future to everyone. CONNAX software is easy to deploy and use, find out more today, by joining our community and getting access to UTIM™ whitepapers.
To be continued…
