Importance of Connectivity in the age of Smart Cities

If the latest trends of urbanization are believed, the city will remain the place where people will want to settle despite the fact that cities will be the place that would be more crowded, would consume high amount of energy and even higher percentages of the worldwide CO2 emission. The well-known reason is opportunities for human prosperity are more in and around cities.

Since long, humans have been building up cities with the blend of craftsmanship and technology, but recently, we have been able to use software and devices to monitor and govern the city in real time. This is a very early stage of smart cities as we are in the beginning of discovering how digital and physical interlock with one another.

Internet of Things leads to an increase in penetration of connectivity in urban surroundings, ranging from people’s homes to cars and from garbage bin to the LED lights in offices. Our smartphone has transitioned from being a data collectors to a mobile gateways that enable providers to make all kinds of data services available.

The SMART & SMACT relation

The innovatory inception and revolutionary acceptation of SMACT help us understand how the city and its people function that affects the digitally controlled behavior of the city. By the way SMACT, more or less has become the lifestyle of urban citizen that attracts more data which need more Internet and ultimately more connectivity.

A smart city may mean different things to different people, it could be a smart design architecture, smart planning, execution & monitoring of utilities, smart housing, smart mobility for all types communications or smart deployment of

technology.

The ICT way of defining it is the city which adopt scalable solutions that take advantage of information and communications technology (ICT) to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and enhance the quality of life. For example from devices on your palm to the vehicles you drive-in , in campuses you learn and at public places you visit, data will empower you every moment majorly driven by ICT enabled apps.

Opportunities for ICT solutions

These developments bring new business opportunities where “Intelligent Building” is one of the essential aspect. Various utilities, energy systems and communication network need integration for efficient building management systems. Convergence is key to leverage IP everywhere concept that runs two or more different technologies on a single device or System. It is the capability of the Internet to act as a single foundation for various services that traditionally had their proprietary platforms, protocols and physical infrastructure.

Looking at the exponential growth in high data rates, convergence is no more limited to only computers and office networks, it has become a very important tool to achieve the requirements of mobility, Big Data and next generation networking.

This brings in newer applications, newer platforms, newer design architecture and newer physical connectivity media. Some of them are listed below:



> Communication Networks (Pervasive & Seamless Wireless, Broadband and Fixed Broadband Connectivity, FTTH, 3G, Wi-Fi hot-Spots)

> Network Operation Centers ( Energy, Transport, Security & Surveillance, Traffic)

> Fault-tolerant Cloud Data Centers (Web and Video Streaming capabilities,  Virtualized Servers and Compute resources, Data Storage)

> Home Networking

> Smart Society (Local Websites, Service Portals, Action Forums, Leverage Analytics to deliver SMART Information)

Impact on Physical Connectivity

The media consideration is important to effectively deploy above mentioned solutions. Fiber optic has become a unanimous choice for higher bandwidth, longer distances, fast speed and more importantly convergence. In fact, this period is an era of “fiber-to-the-everything”, where fibre connectivity is indispensable to support services of smart cities. The impact on existing and future networks is going to push the need for more bandwidth and more speed. This clearly is a driving force behind FTTx deployments in our country.The mega data centers and co-location facilities require more managed connectivity solution to automate the infrastructure. Technically speaking, the products and solutions that provide Data anytime, anywhere are in unconditional demand.

By making use of new technology, the smart city will develop a new, higher level of smartness. The way leading to this higher level runs via people’s digital behavior in the areas of purchasing, environment, power consumption, health etc. ultimately, we are all part of the network that can have a huge impact on economical choices: both bottom-up and top-down. It is the connectivity that need to be smart enough to make everything available anywhere, at ever increasing speed to fulfill the purpose of smart cities.