COMMENT
“Our journey
towards the smart
cities of tomorrow
must be less of a
sprint and more of a
methodical march.”
The report also states that smartphone
adoption reached 28% in 2016, which
is expected to increase to 50% by 2020.
“Every aspect of
our lives, from
our classroom
experiences to our
daily commute, is
being digitised.”
Figures like these call out for diligence
when selecting wireless platforms
built for the future, as many smart
city solutions involve continuous data
feedback to/from citizens, as well
as municipal authorities. Certainly,
significant capacity is required to serve
the rising numbers of connected citizens
and their associated mobile devices.
Always-on reliability is a standard
assumption among solutions providers
and government innovators. And
flexibility in configuration is also a must,
so that policy-makers and enterprises
can respond quickly to unexpected shifts
in citizens’ behaviour.
Wireless presents itself as an obvious
candidate for any government intent
on crafting its own smart city. But
care must be taken when selecting
the platform on which all future smart
solutions will be built. Choose the wrong
one and visionary advances could
quickly grind to a halt. An effective smart infrastructure also
needs to enable split-second decision
making, in the order of 3ms or lower
for most known applications today.
Adopting a 3G platform with latencies
in excess of 100ms, clearly will not meet
the stringent requirements of anything
‘smart’. And 4G networks only reach 50
or 60ms in latency. Even 5G, projected
to deliver response times of between
1 and 5ms, will be delivered as a series
of shared networks, used by millions of
consumers and businesses, coming with
all the known bottlenecks at different
times of the day.
Mobile matters Quality of service
According to GSMA Intelligence’s
Mobile Economy 2017 report, mobile
Internet subscriber penetration in sub-
Saharan Africa reached 44% in 2016
and is projected to top 50% by 2020. A suitable, quality of service, mobile
Internet solution needs to be IP-
based, provide guaranteed delivery
of each and every packet and be
capable of connecting seamlessly to
www.intelligentcio.com
Kamal Mokrani, Global Vice President,
InfiNet Wireless
any data source and any current or
future sensors. Consider the CCTV-
based public safety system mentioned
earlier. Real-time image-processing is
computationally expensive. Low latency,
reliability of data transfer and fast
processing capabilities come together
to deliver features such as instant facial
recognition, automatic number plate
recognition (ANPR) and a host of other
crowd-based analytics services that
ultimately translate into safer and more
secure environments.
The above examples also illustrate the
need for any smart infrastructure to
mitigate interference and radio noise,
especially as the number of wireless
networks will undoubtedly increase
within the fledgling smart city as more
services are rolled out. Failure to do so
will lead to a degradation in accuracy
and reliability of the data transfers.
The more interference there is, the less
desirable the results from real time
analytics engines.
Stay the course
Our journey towards the smart cities
of tomorrow must be less of a sprint
and more of a methodical march.
Healthcare, education, security and
public safety all await the innovators.
Their solutions – if built on the back of a
robust, flexible, responsive and reliable
wireless platform – will usher in that
new smart city age for which we have
all been waiting. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
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