The Ayuntamiento de Puebla is moving forward with a public procurement process for up to 35 multifunction smart poles that will combine LED street lighting, video surveillance cameras, panic buttons, and free public Wi-Fi, all connected to the city’s centralized emergency operations center.
Integrated Security Hardware Linked to Puebla’s Emergency Command Center
The smart poles will be linked directly to Puebla’s Dirección de Emergencias y Respuesta Inmediata (DERI), the emergency monitoring and dispatch unit that operates under the municipal Secretaría de Seguridad Ciudadana (SSC). The DERI currently manages a surveillance network of over 1,900 cameras across 928 monitoring points in the city, alongside its 911 call processing center and the citizen-facing Alerta Contigo mobile app. The new smart poles would add a physical panic-button layer to this digital emergency ecosystem, allowing residents and passersby to trigger alerts that reach dispatchers and the nearest patrol officers within seconds.
Site Selection Driven by Crime Data and Interagency Coordination
The municipality’s Secretary of Mobility and Infrastructure, David Aysa de Salazar, confirmed the planned procurement of 30 to 35 units and noted that placement decisions are being coordinated with the SSC through joint working sessions led by the agency’s head, Félix Pallares Miranda. Priority will be given to zones with the highest crime incidence rates. Planned installation locations include bus stops, public parks, and medium-to-high-speed roadways, areas identified as both high-traffic and vulnerable to street crime.
Adaptive Lighting and the Federal “Senderos de Paz” Connection
City officials have stated that the smart poles will feature adaptive lighting capabilities, adjusting brightness levels based on real-time conditions and specific requirements. This functionality is intended to complement the federal government’s “Senderos de Paz” (Pathways of Peace) program, a national initiative led by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration that focuses on recovering and upgrading public spaces through improved illumination, walkway infrastructure, and community engagement activities. The federal program has already invested over MXN 1.6 billion in secure-pathway construction across municipalities in the State of Mexico, Sonora, and Michoacán, with LED lighting as a core component.
Building on Puebla Brilla: From LED Retrofit to Multifunction Infrastructure
The smart-pole procurement represents a technological step up from the municipality’s existing Puebla Brilla program, a citywide LED street-lighting modernization effort that aims to achieve 100% LED coverage across the municipality. Puebla Brilla, operated in partnership with Citelum México, has focused primarily on luminaire replacement and public-lighting management. The smart poles add surveillance, connectivity, and emergency-response capabilities on top of the lighting function, positioning them as integrated urban-infrastructure nodes rather than single-purpose fixtures.
Smart Poles in the Latin American Context
Smart-pole deployments remain relatively nascent in Latin America compared with Europe, North America, and parts of Asia, where cities like Barcelona, New York, Singapore, and Seoul have deployed multifunction poles at scale. However, municipalities across the region are beginning to explore integrated street furniture as a way to consolidate urban services, lighting, connectivity, environmental monitoring, and public safety, into a single asset class. Puebla’s procurement, while modest in scale at 30–35 units, signals growing municipal appetite in Mexico for converged infrastructure that goes beyond basic LED upgrades.
For comparison, in the United States, South Korean firm LG CNS recently secured contracts to deploy smart poles in Hogansville, Georgia, equipped with EV chargers, AI-powered CCTV, public Wi-Fi, environmental sensors, and emergency call buttons, a feature set closely resembling what Puebla is pursuing. In Portugal, Omniflow recently deployed one of the country’s largest smart-pole systems along a five-kilometre stretch in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira.
What Remains Unclear
The Ayuntamiento de Puebla has not yet published the formal tender documents or disclosed the estimated budget for the procurement. No specific technology vendors or equipment manufacturers have been named publicly, and it is unclear whether the city will favor European suppliers or open the bidding to domestic and international firms. The timeline for installation also remains unspecified, though officials have indicated the evaluation phase will follow initial deployment before any decision to scale up.
