TOM SNEE SMARTCITIES
FIBRE IS THE KEY TO SMART CITIES BUILDING ON THE PAST TO CREATE AN ULTRA-FAST FUTURE
There’s no doubt that fibre will be vital to the development of smart cities but there are some difficult decisions to be made. Tom Snee investigates.
spectre of the wallet-crunching logistical challenges that laying fibre brings, and the looming arrival of lightning-fast mobile connectivity with 5G, is this long- held belief in danger of proving to be a fallacy? As is nearly always the case, the answer is neither black, nor white. 5G - THE GOLDEN BULLET? With its promise of ubiquitous mobile connectivity, 5G is seen by many as the technology that will kick the smart city arms race into overdrive, so the question regarding the necessity of
I n 1889, the entire central the new buildings a storey higher, atop the rubble of what existed before. An interesting parallel to this innovative act of municipal redevelopment can be drawn to the situation that planners are now facing when looking at how they can keep up with the growing public demand for smart cities. While the dream scenario is to build afresh, the reality is that that decision-makers often have a lot of technological rubble to build upon and increasingly little financial flexibility to do so. While investment into smart cities is growing exponentially - IDC forecasts spending on deployments to hit US$80 billion this year, and grow to US$135 billion by 2021 - much of business district of Seattle was destroyed by fire. Rather than starting again in a different location, budgets and red tape meant that city chiefs decided to regrade the area and construct
this is being driven towards end-use applications, such as intelligent traffic management, smart outdoor lighting and environmental monitoring, as opposed to network infrastructure. This cart-before-horse approach has the potential to cause big problems when it comes to city-wide deployments. London’s 2018 iteration of its Smart London Plan, for example, majored on a ‘bold new approach to connectivity’ featuring 4G and 5G, paying little more than lip service to the need for upgrading existing copper infrastructure to fibre - this despite its own Digital Connectivity in London report which listed ‘making existing infrastructure available for fibre’ as a key recommendation. When it comes to replacing legacy copper networks, fibre has long been seen as the ideal solution for delivering the kind of reliable, ultra-fast backbone upon which smart city deployments will rely to keep the lights on and the traffic moving. However, faced with the twin
fibre networks is one that will be getting seriously discussed in city halls across the globe. With the ongoing financial and logistical
challenges that laying fibre entails, Ana Pesovic, Fixed Networks Fibre Marketing lead at Nokia, says that the temptation for city planners to see the ultra-high- speed mobile connectivity that comes with 5G as a shortcut to a smart city is ever-increasing. “The infrastructure of a smart city – the foundations it’s built on – is perhaps one of the most important elements city planners will have to consider and those that get it right will have a network
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| ISSUE 14 | Q3 2018
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