Here in the NE UK mysterious attachments are appearing on some (tall) LED lampposts. These are not the usual cameras, although we have plenty of those. There seems to be two types i) a shiny metal box ~50 cm tall by 10/20 cm wide, with an aerial, and fitted high up; and ii) a much smaller device fitted lower down (to a different post) with what looks like a mushroom shaped appendage, (no clear sign of an aerial, but that might be it)?
Lamppost attachments
Feb 26, 2026
Last reply: 3 months ago
25 Replies
Anything like this?
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Yes that looks like the i). However, reading the replies, you can understand why I asked here and not on Facebook. None the wiser.
I for one welcome our new overlords with mushroom-shaped appendages.
It's for communicating between lampposts so they can be centrally controlled to turn on/off at different times of the night ...
If lampposts are communicating honestly now, then they are probably more advanced than we humans. They deffo shed more light.
I wish my body was more like one, instead of similar to a sack of spuds.
Tone
Looks like a 5G base station.
Does it f*ck.
usually they put a notice on the pole saying what they are for to discourage the destruction by anti-5g protestors.
These appear to be part of a LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) being rolled out by connexin:-
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not sure if this is the same network or a duplicate but also for reading water meters...
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Dave
5g base stations don't usually have visible aerials, they have MIMO antenna that can beam the signal to individual phones...
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Dave
Have you asked it? You might be lucky.
LOL
This was installed last year, with the large bank of cabinets. Note also the roadside structure a bit further down the road
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O2 mast.
Looks like an EE/Three monopole
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Only if you pay it
Here in Leicester the lamposts are linked to each other and thus back to base but they don't have anything like the device shown attached to them.
I'm also in Leicester, there is a comment on the facebook page I linked, from someone who seemed to have knowledge of the system in use which is described as a "Telensa node" that is coincidentally the system in use in Leicester.
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I must admit I haven't seen such a box on a lamp-post, but maybe there's only a handful of them covering the whole city?
Theyre smart street lamps. They detect if someone has dropped a half-crown, for example and switch on .
Brian
They might have a long wait for the next half-crown…
I feel so sad for my children who didn’t grow up with pre-decimal currency. Yes, it was bonkers but it did have redeeming features and I’m sure it made us much better at arithmetic than those who never knew it.
Tim
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