Smart Cities: Digital transformation for a connected future
AUTHOR
John Lancaster-Lennox
Representative Corporate Officer, President Nokia Solutions and Networks Japan G.K.
Cities across the world are undergoing major transformations owing to population growth, environmental changes, rapid urbanisation, changing demographics among other factors. Such changes are expected to create a huge demand and supply gap for key facilities which cannot be addressed without the intervention of technology. In the coming years, we will need disruptive approaches to sustain and build critical infrastructure such as healthcare, education, transportation, and utilities. When posed with these challenges, technology enablers like Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud, robotics automation will offer solutions to ensure a connected future.
City decision-makers, who have a strong vision of leading their city towards a better future, will have to refocus the conversation on the value they can derive out of these new-age technologies and solutions for the city itself and its citizens. Therefore, the urban leaders must act now to bridge the widening technology gap between their cities and stakeholders. Urban residents and businesses will also have to embrace technological innovation to combat crime, congestion, and pollution, as well as to improve public health, productivity, and living conditions.
New digital technologies can not only help cities to transform but also securely interconnect critical elements of an urban ecosystem to unlock potential economic, business, environmental, and social benefits. By adopting and widening the use of advanced technologies, such as AI, IoT, cloud, public Wi-Fi, one can build a smart urban infrastructure that facilitates real-time interaction among residents, businesses, government entities, and services. To this end, governments and smart city experts can leverage a shared city connectivity platform that digitalises and automates their city while addressing at scale the diversity of connectivity needs.
Furthermore, cities can adopt an array of technologies based on wireless connectivity, supported by several deployment models that can be considered to cater to the cities’ specific needs. Private wireless solutions can especially help cities ensure safety, improve efficiency while increasing automation. Fibre broadband access is also an important piece in the smart city puzzle, owing to its ability to accommodate today’s smart city applications while laying the foundation for future technologies like 5G. Fibre broadband can address a variety of communication needs and applications without burdening the existing infrastructure.
When we look at the benefits and the role of new-age technologies in driving digital transformation across cities, there becomes a clear investment case. Also, when
these technologies are used in conjunction with wider and richer sets of data, cities can tap into the limitless potential of analytics while opening up new value chains and opportunities. Shared, integrated data and analytics platforms minimise investment, generate city-wide insights, facilitate cross domain operations and innovation on-boarding. Further connecting intelligent urban infrastructure to city analytics and integrated operations centre can drive modernisation across the city. The quantitative and qualitative benefits derived out of analytics deliver a virtuous circle of economic prosperity, business growth, and social wellbeing for all citizens.
To build a fully connected city, it is important to have a roadmap that lays down what needs to be accomplished based on the problems and specific needs of the communities. As digital technologies advance, the journey of a city will continue to evolve, and having a roadmap can streamline all the efforts to get desirable returns and value on each proposed investment. In this journey, the importance of having the right technology partners cannot be overemphasised. Technology partners with a long history of understanding and building smart, dynamic networks can bring the city’s vision to life. The role of technology partners becomes even more crucial when one is to build emergency response systems and provide mission-critical communications.
For example, Sendai City in Japan recently showcased an innovative service that leverages the latest wireless broadband technologies and drone technology to inform and guide people in case of tsunamis. Sendai City set forth to build an improved communications and emergency response system that could do a better job of monitoring conditions, alerting the local population, and ensuring that they evacuate the affected area. For this purpose, Sendai City collaborated with Nokia on their smart city project and investigated the usage of technology to make the city more environmentally friendly and resilient to disasters. Working with Nokia, Sendai City successfully tested a private wireless network to support a network of drones for future disaster response.
One can also look at Espoo city in Finland which has earned multiple awards for its efforts to build a smarter city. The city recently trialed 5G powered smart street poles – as part of a publicly funded research project ‘LuxTurrim5G’ – that can power a variety of digital applications and services. Driven by Nokia, this smart city ecosystem project aims to use new digital backbone to promote innovation, create novel digital services and open up business opportunities by integrating a variety of sensors, including video cameras, displays and other devices into smart poles that can be installed throughout the city. Data collected by the sensors stays local and provides a complete, real-time view of what is happening around the city. It enables digital service providers to create applications that support sustainable growth and enrich quality of life within Espoo.
Keeping pace with technological change could be difficult but it cannot be ignored if the goal is to unleash the full potential of smart cities. While investing in digital transformation may put a strain on city budgets, the costs of not doing so could be larger, amounting to losses of millions. To this end, cities require technology partners who can help cities take advantage of their unique assets, thereby making them smarter and more sustainable.
City leaders need to build strategic partnerships that enable cities to do more with less resources, align long-term goals, and generate continuous improvements. There could be roadblocks and the journey may not be easy, but the route to digital transformation will provide phenomenal dividends to all city stakeholders.
Published by www.eujapanforum.com, 2021