One of the key markets that is getting excited about the Internet of Things, and the operational efficiency benefits that can stem from it, is Smart Cities. From metropolis to rural country town, city managers are excited and keen to transform their city to a smart city.
The concept of ‘Smart’ city is not new, ever since movies like ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Minority Report’, people has this vision of what a futuristic city should look like, and many will stride to turn the vision into reality.
The numerous smart city applications and services that are available at the moment are steps in the right direction. The problem that the city managers faces is where to start: there is a lot of difference between having ambitions to be a smart city and the practicalities of achieving it. Machina Research has been delving deeply into the numerous deployments around the world and seeking to understand what makes a successful smart city deployment. Some trends have emerged that can help city manager on how to proceed.
The biggest item on each city’s monthly bill is electricity for street lighting, so it’s logical that “Smart Lighting” is on the top of the wish list for city manager. By just switching to a more energy efficient light bulb it can save up to 30% of the electricity consumption. If the city were to add connected intelligence to the service, whereby the streetlight can be control, adapt to environmental conditions, a further 20-30% saving can be achieved. The beauty of this service is that the saving from it can be invested into other “smart” projects making it easier for future services to get off the ground. However, as the saying goes “no pain, no gain”. In order to achieve the enormous saving, upfront capital investment is needed, from swapping out HID bulbs with LED, to installing new network infrastructure for the added intelligent management. This upfront cost has deterred many from pursuing it. However, the barrier is slowly being lowered as the price of LED Light bulbs are dropping due to maturity of the technology. Similarly the cost of connectivity and the maturity of connectivity solutions are falling.
Another application that’s quite popular with the city managers is CCTV. Nobody wants to have it but with terrorism and high crime rates a fact of life for many cities around the world, the service is a much needed requirement. Real positive results has been seen in cities with the service: crime rates have dropped around 20%, and it has increased business confidence and investment in the city, thereby attracting new talents and boosting the city’s standing amongst its peer. With wireless and video encoding technologies advancing in leaps and bound in recent years, there are many options for city manager to choose from when it comes to how to implement the service. For those locations that are hard to reach but non-critical, wireless solution can now cover those blind spots and the bandwidth requirement is lower due to improved video compression algorithm, providing quality service with less bandwidth. However, the city will still need a heterogeneous solution that includes a robust and high bandwidth infrastructures to handle the numerous video feeds from cameras in mission critical location that will not be interference by the weather conditions.
These two applications are seeing increasingly rapid deployments. However, a one-size-fits-all approach is not the right way to go. Every city is different and has different requirements. Many city manager have fallen into the trap of blindly following the early adopters which often leads to failure because each city is unique, with its own capabilities, problems and vision. To succeed in smart cities, city managers need a tailored deployment plan that factors in the idiosyncrasies of their particular scenario, factoring in their own particular goals, capabilities, budgets, structure, and characteristics of that city.
Author is Alex Chau, research director, head of Asia, Machina Research
