Smart City IoT Networks

Industrial wireless technology serves as the essential cornerstone for smart city development by providing the stable and reliable connectivity required for modern urban environments. Unlike standard commercial hardware, industrial grade wireless access points and WiFi bridges are engineered with superior environmental adaptability including IP68 rated dust and water resistance and a wide operating temperature range from -40 to 75℃. These specialized devices ensure continuous and secure data transmission across transportation hubs, industrial parks, and public squares where environmental stressors are constant. By leveraging information technology to enhance service quality, smart cities require this ubiquitous and stable network foundation to support the vast ecosystem of connected devices and sensors.

In the smart transportation sector, industrial wireless networks function as a powerful tool for dynamic data transmission and device interconnection. Urban public transit systems such as buses and subways rely on these networks to upload real-time passenger volume, vehicle location, and onboard surveillance footage for precise scheduling and safety management. Similarly, fixed infrastructure like smart traffic lights and high definition checkpoints require the real-time backhaul of massive traffic flow data to a central command center. Deploying industrial wireless solutions in these scenarios avoids the extreme costs and logistical difficulties of road excavation and fiber optic cabling while maintaining gigabit backbone speeds for bridge health monitoring and traffic surveillance.

Public safety applications within smart cities also benefit from the high bandwidth and low latency offered by industrial wireless hardware. City squares, commercial streets, and key public areas require high definition video surveillance that can withstand unpredictable weather and potential lightning strikes. Maxon industrial bridges and APs are ideal for high altitude surveillance backhaul, utilizing building rooftops to establish point to multipoint networks that cover large urban areas. This approach is significantly more flexible and cost effective than leasing dedicated carrier lines, allowing city managers to rapidly add new monitoring points or deploy mobile emergency command centers in response to urgent incidents.

The integration of IoT for municipal utilities represents another vital use for industrial wireless technology. Smart cities require real-time visibility into the operational status of manhole covers, environmental monitoring stations, and urban pipeline networks. Because these assets are numerous and dispersed throughout the city, wired connections are often impossible to install. Industrial wireless access points enable self healing mesh networks for smart streetlights, allowing each lamp post to serve as a data transmission point for air quality and noise sensors. This creates a low power, large area sensor network that optimizes energy consumption and provides a detailed digital map of the urban environment.

Beyond surface level applications, industrial wireless bridges and clients are essential for monitoring underground pipe corridors and pump rooms. These devices transparently bridge various industrial protocols such as Modbus and Ethernet over WiFi to a centralized control center, enabling remote fault warnings for water, gas, and heat supplies. This wireless to wireless approach is particularly effective in tunnels and underground facilities where cabling is physically restricted. By addressing the core challenges of high mobility and harsh environments, Maxon industrial wireless solutions provide the high performance connection infrastructure necessary to drive urban digital transformation and intelligent upgrades.

Key application scenarios include in-vehicle wireless connectivity. Deploying Maxon industrial wireless access points on buses or commercial vehicles, with models supporting a wide operating temperature range of -40~75°C and featuring a shock-resistant design, provides stable Wi-Fi for on-board monitoring, information screens, and ticketing systems. Furthermore, using Maxon's long-range, high-bandwidth industrial wireless bridges, high-speed point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links can be established between vehicles and platforms, enabling rapid and automatic offloading of large amounts of data, such as on-board surveillance footage, when vehicles enter stations. Alternatively, in urban road infrastructure interconnection scenarios, industrial WiFi bridges can be used to establish stable wireless backhaul links between remotely located smart traffic lights, electronic police systems, and traffic information screens, avoiding the hassle and cost of road excavation. For example, deploying industrial-grade bridges at both ends of a newly built elevated bridge can quickly establish a gigabit wireless backbone network for carrying bridge health monitoring and traffic surveillance data.

In the public safety sector, which is a crucial component of smart cities, industrial wireless technology can provide reliable video surveillance and emergency communications for cities. It can be applied to high-definition video surveillance in city squares, commercial pedestrian streets, and key public areas, as well as urban emergency communications systems.

Maxon's related equipment features high bandwidth, high concurrency, low latency, and high protection, making it ideal for high-definition video surveillance with high-bandwidth and low-latency transmission networks. Monitoring points are often located outdoors and must withstand harsh environments such as wind, rain, and high and low temperatures. Emergency communications require high network reliability and rapid deployment capabilities to respond to emergencies.

Key application scenarios include high-altitude surveillance backhaul. Maxon's outdoor industrial wireless AP bridges are installed at high points in cities or on building rooftops. These IP68-rated and lightning-resistant devices serve as backbone access points, using point-to-multipoint mode to cover large areas. Industrial-grade wireless CPE is then used to connect monitoring points and sensors to the network. Compared to leasing dedicated lines from a carrier, this approach offers more flexible deployment and lower O&M costs, making it particularly suitable for rapidly adding monitoring points. It can also be used for mobile emergency command. By deploying an industrial-grade wireless router or AP in an emergency command vehicle, leveraging its robust WiFi coverage and combining it with multi-SIM aggregation or 5G or LTE cellular networks as an uplink, a mobile on-site command center hotspot can be quickly established. This provides reliable wireless access for on-site law enforcement personnel, drones, and sensors, enabling real-time video backhaul and coordinated command.