Every city has them by now — a vertical LED panel clamped to a lamp post, selling phone plans, car insurance, or a concert next weekend. It looks like a simple product. It is actually a stack of decisions, and most of the expensive mistakes are made long before anyone argues about pixel pitch.
We build these cabinets in Shenzhen, and the same questions come up before every order. Here are the ones that decide whether a light-pole screen becomes a revenue asset or a maintenance queue.
1. The pole is the constraint, not the screen
A street light pole was engineered to carry a luminaire and its own wind load. It was not engineered for 1.5 m² of steel, glass, and power supply hanging at four metres. Before you look at a single datasheet, collect three numbers:
- pole diameter and wall thickness at the mounting height
- the pole's rated wind load, and the local design wind speed
- whether the pole is hollow enough to pull cable through, or whether you need an external conduit
If the pole cannot take the load, no amount of screen specification will save the project. In practice this is where double-sided installations fail first — two faces mean roughly twice the sail area on the same clamps.
2. Height and viewing distance set the pitch
Street-side audiences are close. Pedestrians pass at 1–3 m, cars at 4–8 m, and the panel usually starts around 2.2–2.8 m above the pavement so nobody walks into it. That geometry has two consequences.
First, content is portrait. A 960 × 1920 cabinet is the standard shape for a reason: the creative already exists in 9:16. Design for the panel, not for a landscape slide squeezed into it.
Second, the pitch debate is mostly settled by distance. At 3–6 m, P4 and P5 both read cleanly; P6.67 is fine when the creative is bold type and simple imagery; P2.5 at street level buys density that no passer-by will resolve. If a supplier leads with pitch and never asks where people stand, that is a signal.
3. Double-sided or single-sided
A double-sided cabinet is one structure with two faces, usually one controller and one power feed. You sell the same pole twice, which is why media owners like it. The trade-offs are real: more weight, more wind load, more heat inside a sealed box, and a service routine that has to reach both faces.
Single-sided cabinets are lighter and cheaper to mount, and on a narrow pavement they are often the only option that keeps the screen out of the pedestrian envelope. The material split matters too: aluminium for city centres, iron for industrial roads.
4. Brightness is a daylight number
A screen that faces the sun needs brightness headroom. 5,000–6,000 nits is the working range for street-side advertising in full sun; at 3,500 nits the image goes flat and grey by early afternoon.
Two things matter as much as the peak number. The first is dimming: a 6,000-nit panel running at full power at 2 a.m. is a complaint from residents, so the control system needs a proper dimming curve, not an on/off schedule. The second is heat. Brightness is current, current is heat, and a sealed aluminium box in July is an oven. Ask how the cabinet moves air, and ask what the brightness derating looks like at 45 °C ambient.
5. Sealing, wind, and the fixing interface
IP65 is a lab rating. The installed reality is decided by details:
- cable entry direction — a gland facing upward is a water funnel
- drainage path at the bottom of the cabinet
- the corrosion behaviour of the clamp where aluminium meets galvanised steel
- the bracket drawing, which is the part nobody reviews until installation day
Ask for the bracket drawing before you sign. If it does not exist yet, the installation is being designed on site by whoever brought the ladder.
6. Content delivery is half the product
Forty poles in a district are a network, not forty products. The questions that decide the operating cost are unglamorous: does the player keep playing when the link drops, how are playlists scheduled per pole, how does an operator know which physical pole is "device 27", and how is a firmware update pushed without sending a technician to each site.
A pre-order checklist
- Pole diameter, wall thickness, wind rating
- Audience distance, panel size, portrait or landscape
- One face or two
- Daytime brightness target and night dimming curve
- Cable entry direction and drainage
- Mounting bracket drawing
- Content platform: local player, 4G, or scheduled USB
- Spare modules, and who is allowed to climb the pole
Every one of those is cheaper to answer on paper than from a scissor lift at 7 a.m.
What we build
The DGB5 is our double-sided aluminium light-pole screen: a vertical cabinet designed to clamp onto existing poles, with IP65 sealing, a front service door, and support for 4G/WiFi cluster management so a whole street can be scheduled from one laptop. Specs and drawings live here: https://www.mlxled.com/product/dgb5-double-alu/
If you are specifying a street-side network, spend the first meeting on the pole and the audience. The pixel pitch will sort itself out.
I work with MuenLED, a Shenzhen LED manufacturer.
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