Each individual LED is configurable over newly installed copper and fiber optic networks. USJS Telecom spliced and tested all the fiber to the 24 managed switches in the field. They also terminated and tested the 176 unmanaged switches fed by Cat5 cable. These networks support the project’s active data transfer rate of approximately 32 Mbps.
It took 6 months to install the project’s components and 8.8 million dollars to bring the project to fruition. Investors include Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, creator of Gmail Paul Buchheit, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, and others. The project is expected to bring 97 million dollars to the San Francisco economy.
The lights consume between 150-175 kW of electricity for approximately 7 hours each night. All of the electricity for the project is supplied by CleanPath’s offsite solar farm in Davis, California. Matt Cheney, CEO of CleanPath states “we’re powering a light installation, at night, on the north side of a bridge, in the foggiest city in the world, with solar power.”