Connectivity and convergence for smarter cities

K.K Shetty 

By 2020, there will be over 5 billion internet users, with over half of them accessing the internet over handheld tablet devices and 50 billion connected devices worldwide. This connectivity will spread to our daily lives bringing the three silos of work, home and our surrounding environment into one seamless experience termed by some analysts as “connected living.”

In a smart city, we need systems that can handle traffic for all major wireless subscribers as well as the airport’s public safety workforce eliminating coverage gaps for security personnel, ensuring continuous contact in elevators, stairwells, parking lots or anywhere else in the facility. Any smart city is also measured on its ability to address coverage and capacity issues.

The FTTH council smart cities committee states that for a city to be labeled smart, it must have implemented all of the three initiatives below:

• A strong and reliable communications network, preferably based on fiber optics
• Govt. involvement to provide value to the citizens
• Initiatives to promote the use of renewable energy

According to Frost & Sullivan report on “World’s Top Global Mega Trends To 2025 and Implications to Business, Society and Cultures”; there are a few very interesting trends which have great implication for cities getting smarter, green and more connected.

• Connectivity and convergence: With Internet connectivity and the number of connected devices soaring, the report refers to a new wave of technology-enabled services – from smart governance to connected devices– that will shape our daily lives.

• Future of mobility: In the future, people and organizations will want personal mobility (not necessarily cars or trucks) to travel from A to B, as journeys will become integrated with intelligent and smart technologies, enabled by a single ticket or membership to provide seamless travel on multi-modal transport systems,. And the use of apps to get to practically anything you want for your convenience sitting in your homes.

• Smart is the new green: Green was the mega trend of the last decade; smart products will be a hallmark of the next decade with smart clothing, smart watches, smart buildings, smarter and greener cars and smart cities.

• Increasing urbanization converting ‘cities to customer’: So there will no longer be mega cities but mega regions and mega corridors and they will be become destinations for large scale investment rather than nations.

The smart city market in particular will take off with the industry expected to be worth $1.5 trillion by 2020, experts predict. The ever increasing need for “Always’ on connectivity” will push other sub trends, like big data to create market opportunities for new products and services, new systems to enable Telecom service providers to give more coverage and increase capacity of data consumption for their users, which is resulting in operators beginning to deploy small cells to deliver the required capacity and coverage for 4G and soon the 5G networks. They will be bringing cellular infrastructure to our neighborhood streets and utility poles. The answer is to make systems smaller, and to build infrastructure that can be shared among multiple operators so each operator doesn’t need its own gear out on the street and install multiple towers thus contributing to more visual pollution and “not so good looking and planned” cities.

One of the ways to enhance communication in cities is by using a Distributed Antenna System. Such a system can allow mobile subscribers to place clear calls and improve data usage. Technically, such a system works with an available signal source (either an antenna/repeater that captures the signal from the service provider’s macro network, or directly from a small cell or base station) and then uniformly distributes it throughout a given area via a series of distributed amplifiers and antennas. A DAS can deliver signals from one or multiple service providers, depending on the number of different base stations or signal sources to which it is connected. The good thing about DAS equipment is that it’s getting smaller due to technology innovation.

The author is Director- Network Solutions, TE Connectivity

The article was published in PCQuest June 2014 issue