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Friday, 29.03.2024
eGovernment Forschung seit 2001 | eGovernment Research since 2001

Let this sink in: Southeast Asia, India and Europe are beating us when it comes to the smart cities movement.

At least, that’s according to Jim Haskins, Cisco’s Smart Connected Communities/IoT specialist.

“We’re a little slow on the uptake,” he told a 200-strong crowd gathered for the second day of the sixth annual Clean Tech Summit in Chapel Hill.

The reason? Too many layers of government, among other things, he says.

“I had the opportunity to meet with a CIO from Singapore,” he recounted speaking from the main auditorium of The Friday Center on Friday morning.

“She said, ‘it’s kind of easy for us. We make decisions at the top of government, and then we push it down. You guys in America have this democracy thing. You’ve got states, and cities and counties, and you’ve got to get everybody on the same page.”

The scope of challenges

And that’s just the beginning.

As part of the summit co-hosted by UNC’s Institute for the Environment and Center for Sustainable Enterprise, Haskins detailed the scope of challenges facing city officials across the country in the race to embrace smart solutions for everyday problems.

Among them: the exponential increase in the number of things gathering information at the edge of the network that are not all on the same platform, he said.

He used as an example an unnamed city that Cisco is working with for its trash management scheme to service 6000 trashcans. The city wanted to re-route its daily pickups based on levels of trash.

The problem was not all the bins were the same or using a similar form of communication. Some were using cellular, others wi-fi and another Lora (long-range low-battery sensors).

“How do I aggregate data from three different types of [trashcans] from different types of [sensor], and then normalize that data?” he asked.

Enter Cisco Kinetic for Cities operating system, which connects with any technology, enables cross-domain contextual control and exposes application programming interface (APIs) for local and global independent software vendors (ISVs) applications.

Working in silos

Another problem was the siloed and fragmented approach that cities traditionally use to address issues such as traffic management, public safety, waste management, city lighting and parking.

It’s “inefficient, uneconomic and has limited effectiveness,” he said.

“Think about going down the interstate. There’s a video camera about every quarter of a mile. My goodness, that’s a lot of data. We’ve got to be able to process that data at the end of the network and only send the relevant data.”

By 2022, there will be over 400 million 5G connections.

“No matter what we chose today, in 18 momths there’s going to be something better. Boy, this makes this a sticky mess to try to solve the networking challenges that occur in a smart city,” said.

The solution: a robust ecosystem that allows for the share of data across a number of different vendors and platforms.

“We’re seeing that there is this trend of integrated sensors, normalized domains and cross domain sharing,” he said.

Itron CEO Philip Mezey, who spoke after Haskins, agreed.

“We really have to open up our platforms in order to encourage innovation,” he said.

“[We must] publish the standards and development kits and welcome the notion of having universities and startup companies develop technologies and ideas that we had never thought of. There are some fascinating areas of collaboration.”

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Autor(en)/Author(s): Chantal Allam

Quelle/Source: WRAL Tech Wire, 01.03.2019

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