Backbone of smart cities
African cities are in a good
position to accelerate into Smart City stature due to the rapid urbanisation
their cities are experiencing, lessons learnt from other first world countries
as well as the economic opportunity many African cities hold. In these environments,
enhanced connectivity forms the backbone for smart city communications and
applications, enabling networks to carry the real-time information that makes
cities ‘smart.’ These connections between almost every type of smart device,
appliance or machine, will allow cities to reduce traffic congestion and
vehicle emissions, manage waste disposal, conserve energy and optimise the
efficiency of utilities.
Emerging 5G capabilities will even facilitate communications between smart, and eventually driverless, cars that will connect to the larger smart city network. With 5G networks touted as having latency rates of under a millisecond, near-instantaneous delivery of information will support rapid responsiveness needed by autonomous vehicles when confronting an imminent danger like a pedestrian. Today, service providers are introducing software that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology, which can be as smart and dynamic as the smart cities themselves. New software innovations can analyse data patterns and identify anomalies, spikes of traffic or congestion and instruct the city’s traffic control systems to take appropriate action.
The impending 5G transition, with significant advances in bandwidth and improved latency and quality of service (QoS), will enable a new wave of services including enhanced mobile broadband, connected cars, drones, smart retail, industrial robots, and much more. This new era of 5G networks will see not only technology innovations, but also business model innovations that result in intelligent devices and applications consuming and generating data like never before. Imagine the future — what used to be possible only in science fiction movies — flying drones, driverless cars and planes, machine-to-machine interactions, seamless communication around the globe — is fast becoming a reality.
Transformation journey, not an overnight upgrade
As cities and countries across
Africa look to capitalise on the benefits of enhanced connectivity through
broadband deployment, their journey may include obstacles. 5G is not simply an
evolution of 4G – it requires massive transformation, demanding new distributed
architectures using software-defined infrastructure.
When government invests in this new software-defined world, it is imperative to remember that it’s constructed upon common building blocks of compute, storage and networking. For example, 5G requires multiple ecosystems driven by use cases and end-user experiences, a highly distributed infrastructure and workload agility in a cloud native environment. Establishing this baseline on open, interoperable standards will set governments up for innovation and flexibility as they continue on their connectivity journeys.
As we leverage enhanced connectivity to enable new use cases as part of wider smart city initiatives, networks must be equipped to deal with the extensive usage variations associated with everyday life in a major city. As bandwidth use shifts with traffic patterns, day-and-night cycles and major city events, IT leaders need to focus on how these stressors are affecting networks. We cannot accept the status quo when we’ve seen what technology and data can do when needed most.
As populations grow, government services must be effective, efficient and equitable. Moving forward, remember that this transformation is a gradual architectural evolution, and an opportunity for communities and governments to close the connectivity divide to bring to fruition the next wave of technology led, human progress.
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