Cities locked into single vendor solutions

Every day a new smart city project is announced: streetlights are being connected to save energy and increase the quality of lighting services in the streets; waste containers are being monitored to reduce truck traffic whilst helping cities to get cleaner; free parking spaces are detected and advertised to drivers both to reduce pollution and to allow variable pricing depending on their availability; and more. Most of the available solutions today, however, are proprietary, locking cities into single vendor solutions.

By using the Smart City Protocol and integrating the TALQ OpenAPI Specification, one single central management software (CMS) can control a heterogenous network combining various vendors' solutions.

Thanks to the global TALQ standard, cities can now choose and adopt control solutions from multiple manufactures.

Benefits of TALQ going public

In July 2021 the consortium decided to publish the detailed specification and share it on GitHub. Open access to the protocol allows manufacturers of CMS and Outdoor Device Networks (ODN, so called ‘Gateways’) to integrate the OpenAPI specification into their own systems and to become interoperable with the solutions of other vendors.

The entire smart city community can now profit from decades of smart street lighting and smart city experience and develop future-proof solutions, whilst at the same time opening the specification up to public scrutiny and verification.