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Verizon Is Moving From Telephone Poles To Light Poles for Smart Devices (fortune.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the further-expansion dept.

An anonymous reader shares a Fortune report:Verizon is moving from telephone poles to street lighting poles with its latest acquisition to bolster its Internet of things business. The telecom giant has been looking for new growth areas around connected smart devices -- including water meters, self-driving cars, and drones -- as some of its traditional markets slow. On Monday, Verizon said it was buying privately-held Sensity, a company that puts sensors in LED street lamps to perform functions such as monitoring traffic and detecting security threats. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. It's the latest in a string of acquisitions to bolster the carrier's IoT unit. Verizon agreed to pay $2.4 billion for truck tracking service Fleetmatics last month and startup Telogis, another fleet-tracker, earlier this summer.

3 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Die, IoT, die! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    a company that puts sensors in LED street lamps to perform functions such as monitoring traffic and detecting security threats.

    Where "sensors" means "cameras", and "monitoring traffing and detecting security threats" means "watching everyone and everything". And the image feeds will probably have license-plate reading and face recognition thrown in, or could with the next software upgrade.

    And since it's a corporation doing it (Verizon) vs a government agency, warrants etc don't enter into it. (No expectation of privacy within view of a streetlight anyway, right?). Until NSA/FBI/etc asks Verizon nicely for their data (no warrant required, they're just asking -- or perhaps buying.)

    Five years ago this would have sounded like something from the tin-foil-hat brigade. Now? Not so much.

    1. Re:Die, IoT, die! by markdavis · · Score: 2

      >"Not so sure if I would want the light outside my house turning on and off all night."

      Me neither. So, imagine what driving would be with lights that turn on only when you are close enough THEY could see you. It would be a mess. And how would they "see" pedestrians and bikes at night, accurately?

      I think just having them be a lot more efficient and aimed properly (designed for proper light dispersion only where it is needed) would do what we need to save tons of energy while generating less glare and light pollution. Also, I don't think they really need to be anywhere near as bright as they typically are... and if they were a proper color, that might help things too (that horrible, sick, orange color of sodium lights and anemic green/blue of mercury vapor lights really doesn't help).

  2. Lightspy by markdavis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    http://www.sensity.com/compute...
    http://www.sensity.com/for-sec...

    Oh great, just what we need- turning all the hundreds of thousands of streetlamps into spy cameras. Monitor all vehicles, read and store all plates, monitor all pedestrians, monitor all houses and driveways, add facial recognition. Oh, but it is in "public spaces" and so it would never be abused... everything will be transparent, it would never be hacked either..... right.