The concept of the Smart City been a topic of great interest of late among service providers of all kinds and is currently experiencing a major resurgence. The global smart cities market is expected to grow $1,134.84 billion by 2019 (Source: MarketsandMarkets) With this wave, in past months, India has announced plans to create 100 Smart Cities; China has committed $8B in Smart City development and research firm IHS projected there will be at least 88 Smart Cities globally by 2025. Along with the projections there are significant examples of successful smart cities across the globe including Barcelona in Spain, San Jose in California, Amsterdam and many more.
The smart city opens up new types of services and looks to address new technical, environmental and economic challenges. All stakeholders including IT companies, telcos, utilities, infrastructure providers and real estate developers need to reconsider their roles and how those impact their business models, modes of operation and partnering strategies. A few of the key technology sectors that are enabling the smart city and are also being shaped by the requirements of this emerging market are: smart IT and communications, smart transport, smart water and waste management, smart building systems, and the enabling ICT platforms for the smart city need to understand the opportunities well.
Perhaps, the smart cities represent the greatest opportunities for CSPs (Communication Service Provider) to establish their context in the evolving market as a technology provider, offer platforms for seamless connectivity, IoT offerings, M2M, Location based services, monetization and much more. This will create a handful of prospects for CSPs on which a variety of services can be launched in an integrated fashion with other ecosystem members, thus creating sustainable solutions. Cities which already have networks of public Wi-Fi hotspots will often use these as an initiator for a more integrated smart city roll out, so this is a significant opportunity for the technology and for service providers, whether they are MNOs and MSOs.
All projects related to Smart Cities systematically involve the public Wi-Fi service for nomadic access. With Wi-Fi becoming the key connectivity enabler along with the right perspective on the BSS/OSS infrastructure – CSPs can give themselves substantial advantages in this marketplace as below:
- Connectivity will be especially vital because one of the most important components in Smart Cities is communication. A mix of wireless connectivity technologies including cellular and Wi-Fi makes the most sense to quickly and reliably run Smart City networks
- User authentication plays a key role, the best user experience is achieved through a transparent authentication process and the best practice is an instant access, based on the user’s device
- To enable maximum citizens to be connected to Wi-Fi, access through Web portal or a customized mobile application for multiple devices with dynamic screen size can help to login and access data across locations
- The recent advancement of Smart City is in large part driven by the Internet of thing (IoT), which is simultaneously creating and being enabled by advances in cloud technology, security, mobile connectivity and M2M
- As far as monetization of smart city based applications is concerned, it can be done with the help of Wi-Fi connectivity. End users can be offered real time location based services, advertisements, promotional offers and with an analytics tool and reporting, effective monitoring on the impact of the services launched can be evaluated
- Through Wi-Fi a centralized information repository can be managed thus enabling real time citizen services. In such scenario, consumers will get what they are looking for and thus, be a win-win situation for every stake holder
