February 24, 2014 – Royal Philips and Ericsson have launched a new, connected LED street lighting model called ‘Zero Site’ that aims to solve two major issues facing today’s cities: providing citizens with better network performance in dense urban areas and high-quality, energy-efficient public lighting.

“We are offering lighting as a service that scales with a city’s needs and enables city officials to offer their citizens a more connected, energy-efficient and safer urban environment, while preserving existing budgets and resources to improve the livability of their city,” explained Frans van Houten, president and CEO of Philips.

The Philips-Ericsson model allows city authorities to offer space within their connected lighting poles to network service providers for mobile broadband infrastructure.

Philips will now offer LED street lighting that can include mobile telecom equipment from Ericsson. Mobile operators working with Ericsson for mobile broadband infrastructure will be able to rent space in these poles. In this way, mobile network operators will be able to improve data coverage and capacity for citizens, explain the partners, while accelerating the payback time for city infrastructure by making the upfront costs of installing and managing these systems more affordable.

“City populations are increasing at the rate of 7500 people per hour, but our world is not geographically expanding,” noted Ericsson president and CEO Hans Vestberg. “This Zero Site solution is the kind of innovation that offers a way for people to succeed in the networked society.”