This report provides Transforma Insights’ view on the public space lighting market. This segment includes the monitoring, control, and management of lighting for streets and other public spaces, typically provided by local government or utilities. Streetlights are a significant contributor to the electricity bills of local authorities, accounting for 15-40% of the total energy consumption in cities worldwide. In many countries, this will result in significant greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce this cost and make streetlighting more sustainable, governments across the globe are spending heavily to replace them with smart LED lamps that can be controlled remotely using different technologies, including Wi-Fi, Cellular, NB-IoT, and RF mesh.
The report provides a detailed definition of the sector, analysis of market development and profiles of the key vendors in the space. It also provides a summary of the current status of adoption and Transforma Insights’ ten-year forecasts for the market. The forecasts include analysis of the number of IoT connections by geography, the technologies used and revenue.
A full set of forecast data, including country-level forecasts, sector breakdowns and public/private network splits, is available through the IoT Forecast tool.
The "Market development" section of the report begins by examining how local governments and public authorities worldwide implement ambient lighting to enhance citizen safety. It then explores the environmental impact of this practice, highlighting the rising electricity consumption and its harmful effects. For instance, in Australia, street lighting is the largest source of emissions from local government, accounting for 30-60% (including 95,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions) of their total emissions and is responsible for the consumption of USD125 million worth of energy every year.
It then explains that to reduce energy bills and to make street lighting more efficient and sustainable, smart LED lamps are now being increasingly deployed, and then discusses the communication technologies they run on (including NB-IoT and RF mesh) and talks about their energy-saving potential. For instance, a February 2025 study in Philadelphia (US) estimated that the upgrade to LED streetlights resulted in a 5% decrease in gun violence and improved residents’ perceptions of safety and neighbourhood vitality.
It also exclaims that many countries are choosing this low-cost option of LED lamps to get a quick return on their investments, IoT solutions can enhance such savings by ensuring more granular control of individual lights. It then talks about some of the government regulations about upgrading to LEDs and smart lighting and their benefits. For instance, the Chicago streetlight modernisation program was completed in 2022 and replaced 280,000 streetlights in the city with smart LED lights over a four-year period. The total budget of the project was USD160 million, and the city is estimated to achieve savings of USD100 million within the first 10 years of operation.
In a tabular format, the report then extensively discusses global street lighting across countries, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Togo, the UAE, the UK, Uruguay, and the US. For further granularity, it bifurcates these countries into national or state levels and then discusses the deployment details. Case in point, at a national level in New Zealand, as of April 2023, 75% of the national street lighting network had either already deployed or was committed to the deployment of smart controls. Otherwise, Auckland had 130,000 wireless smart controls by the same time.
It then goes on to describe other benefits of deploying smart streetlights, including identifying losses and theft from power lines (in countries like India) and optimising traffic management. For instance, the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles have installed thousands of cameras and sensors on streetlights to help authorities monitor and enforce traffic laws in real-time, while also ensuring that crimes do not occur in the area. It also explains how the sensors that are installed on streetlights can also be used to monitor noise level and air quality. It also touches upon another use case, gunshot detection, where sensors on streetlights recognise the sound of gunfire, provide the exact location of gunshots, analyse them, and send all relevant information to local enforcement authorities. It then charts the wide range of communication technologies used in smart streetlights, such as 2G and NB-IoT.
The report then talks about some of the barriers that may impact their deployment in the near future (like constraints in government budget) and provides a few examples of relevant IoT deployments in this application, like the city of Düsseldorf deploying Philips LumiStreet connected streetlights.
The key vendors section lists some of the main providers of products and services related to the market, such as Cimcon Lighting Inc. (owned by Quantela), Itron, Signify, Telensa (Owned by Signify), Ubicqua, and Xiamen Iotcomm Technology. The report provides profiles of the various vendors including aspects most relevant to this Application Group, such as product offerings, pricing, financial results, and technology.
In the market forecasts section, we provide a summary of the forecasts from the Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database:
The report charts the growth in the number of public space lighting devices, which will grow from 48.4 million in 2025 to 165.3 million in 2035. Transforma Insights forecasts are compiled on a country-by-country basis. This report includes a regional summary, showing splits between Australasia, Greater China, North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America, MENA, Russia & Central Asia, South East Asia, South Korea, India & South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Transforma Insights’ IoT forecasts include splits between the various connectivity technologies as follows: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mMTC, 5G non-mMTC, LPWA (non-mMTC), Satellite, Short Range, and Other.
This section discusses which technologies will be used in the Public Space Lighting Application Group.
This part of the report discusses the market growth in terms of revenue (module revenue, service wrap revenue, and VAC revenue). Transforma Insights estimates that the revenue in the Public Space Lighting Application Group will grow at a CAGR of 13%.
