Ten Years of Setting the Smart City Standard

Published on 2022-05-18

For a decade the TALQ Consortium has been dedicated to enabling interoperability in smart cities

The TALQ Consortium is celebrating its 10th anniversary on 23rd June 2022 at the DOLL Living Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 2012, originally with the scope of defining a standard protocol for outdoor lighting, the consortium has evolved to become the ideal framework for achieving compatibility between smart city applications. The main goal has remained the same: to ease and protect investment decisions of cities and utilities.

In the past five to ten years, smart outdoor lighting has become one of the main targets for public investment in cities, not least because of the huge potential for energy-saving costs and the wish to reduce their CO2 footprint. This is why seven street lighting companies agreed to found an industry consortium with the scope of defining a common protocol standard back in 2012. Since then, the TALQ Consortium has developed a standard interface enabling interoperability between street lighting communication networks in the field and the software platforms managing applications over these networks. The goal has always been – and continues to be – to support cities and municipalities on their way to becoming smart cities by protecting them from vendor-lock-in and, in turn, accelerating adoption of energy- and cost-saving systems.

Becoming the global standard
In 2017 the decision was taken to extend the software protocol for use between Central Management Systems and generic Outdoor Devices Networks, beyond street lighting, to enable compatibility between systems from different verticals. The proven TALQ Framework has presented the perfect backbone to foster interoperability between various smart city applications, such as lighting, parking, traffic control, environmental services and waste management.

On June 23, 2022, the consortium will host an event with several smart city experts at the DOLL Living Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explain and highlight the benefits of employing the TALQ protocol. This will be an ideal opportunity to network, find out what is going on in the industry and understand TALQ’s place in the ecosystem. “We are really proud of our joint efforts and the very fruitful collaboration over the past ten years. More than 50 member companies, nearly 20 TALQ partners and more than 40 TALQ-certified products speak for themselves.” summarizes Simon Dunkley, Secretary General of the TALQ Consortium. “It continues to be a great experience to see how industrial cooperation between likeminded organizations can help to reduce public spending, increase sustainability and create open solutions.”

TALQ will continue to review and update its standard. This continuous enrichment and evolution of the protocol ensures that future-oriented aspects of smart city services will be incorporated. The current TALQ Specification is 2.4.0; meanwhile a version 2.5.0 is already under development to be released later in 2022.

Entire press release as pdf

AGENDA and REGISTRATION for June 23, 2022 (participation is free of charge)