Sigfox electricity pole surveillance system:Working,Benefits,Limitations,Solution Providers

Introduction : Electricity poles are critical infrastructure, supporting power delivery across urban and rural areas alike, yet many remain vulnerable to environmental damage, structural degradation, extreme weather or collisions.

Traditional inspection regimes such as manual visual checks at fixed intervals are resource intensive, often reactive and miss early signs of tilt, vibration or damage until failure occurs.

A Sigfox-based electricity pole surveillance system leverages compact, battery powered sensors (e.g. tilt, accelerometer, vibration) installed on poles. These sensors use LPWAN Sigfox network to transmit alerts or periodic condition data to a central monitoring platform.

Sigfox electricity pole surveillance system architecture & Working

The system consists of pole sensor node, Sigfox Base station/Gateway, Cloud/Backend and user/maintenance interface layer.

Pole sensor node houses tilt sensor, accelerometers, vibration sensors, environmental sensors, current or voltage sensors, environmental sensors etc.

Following points describe working of the system.

• The pole sensor node sends the data to sigfox network (i.e. base station or gateway).
• The network forwards messages to the cloud or backend of application.
• The data is being analyzed at cloud platform and alerts will be issued when it exceeds certain threshold via SMS, Email or mobile app.
• Specific pole details such as GPS coordinate / pole ID will be sent to emergency response team from utility companies or maintenance insepctors.

Advantages of Sigfox electricity pole surveillance system

Following are some of the benefits of Sigfox electricity pole surveillance System.

1. Early detection of faulty poles reduces risk to public safety.
2. Such systems offer reduced inspection and maintenance costs as only poles having warning signs are required to be physically inspected.
3. Sensors are event based which offer long battery life which can be many years. Hence frequent maintenance are not needed.
4. Sigfox covers wide area and hence many poles are monitored simultaneously without requiring wired or expensive cellular networks.

Disadvantages of Sigfox electricity pole surveillance system

Following are some of the limitations or challenges of electricity pole surveillance system.

1. As devices are exposed to extreme weather, it requires rugged design.
2. Sometimes, sensors may pick up vibrations or tilts due to wind or passing trucks. This often lead to false alarms.
3. Each sensor must be associated with correct pole ID / location. GIS mapping needs to be accurate so alerts are actionable.

Key Solutions provider

Conclusion: With this setup, utilities can remotely track pole health, get early warnings of dangerous tilt or impact, reduce safety risks, optimize maintenance schedules and avoid costly outages or accidents caused by pole failure.