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Blog
IIoT: Delivering on Your Smart City
Smart ideas to revolutionize your city’s infrastructure network.
Read Time: 4 minutes
In Part I of our discussion on how to develop smart cities, we examined the benefits of smart cities and some of the preliminary network infrastructure that needs to be implemented in order to begin implementation. For many cities, smart lighting is often the first step in creating connecting cities. With the proper network in place, adding additional items that enhance traffic management or AMI can be connected into the entire system using strategic networking tools.
Smart and connected digital lighting is now recognized as the gateway to smart city adoption. Important breakthroughs in lighting technology are driving the replacement of the entire public lighting fleet worldwide. Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology now exceeds the efficiency and reliability of traditional legacy sodium and mercury public lighting. Street light poles are an increasingly valuable piece of vertical real estate, there to be monetized by the pole owner (be it a city, utility or telco). The owner can charge pole attachment and other fees for hosting Smart City applications like sensor platforms, video surveillance, digital signage, small cells and other services sited on street light poles. Monetization of these smart city applications is accomplished via Trilliant’s SecureReach® or SecureMesh® connectivity and Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) technologies, where metered power, edge processing, and data communications are available through smart data hubs mounted on the Smart Lighting.
The Trilliant platform addresses evolving smart Grid, Smart city and IIOT solutions on a single, scalable and secure platform. Ubiquitous, high capacity communication network is positioned to deliver connectivity driven outcome enabling Smart Grid or the Smart City and expansion of related applications. The core connectivity solution must offer:
- Value Today – provide products and services to customers with quick ROI including energy savings, repairs and maintenance savings, quality of lighting services and connected city applications;
- Device Independence – create solutions that work in multiple vendors
- Modular Approach – protect today’s investments while building “plug & play” modules that are compatible with existing installations;
- Open Architecture/APIs – enable third-party, “best-in-class” solutions to join the street lighting network and take advantage of an extensive development community and wide variety of sensors and other devices.
- Partner Ecosystem – utilize a go-to-market and development strategy that leverages key partner strengths.
Trilliant enables outcomes that are focused on improving ultimate customer satisfaction to the most important stakeholders – citizens!! Cities today are working towards solving problems surrounding the environment, mobility, crime prevention and economic growth while also generating revenue. Cities can have effective and efficient data management by using Trilliant’s hybrid wireless connectivity solution. By better understanding demand, consumption, activities and behavior of the data generated by city to drive real time and predictive responses, operational efficiency, optimized revenue generation and ultimately citizen satisfaction and engagement.
Today’s cities need easily adoptable technology solutions backed by financial (as needed and some rules applied) and world class service management. There are many service models available under the managed services options such as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Network as a Service (NaaS) and Lighting as a service (LaaS). Managed services facilitate increased organizational efficiency and improved operations. Cities can leverage managed services to reap benefits such as cost reduction, increased uptime and profitability, 24x7x365 coverage and mission critical security. With managed services, cities can not only focus on citizen engagement but also efficiently monitor health of the city or the city’s mobility.
As one example, interaction monitors can allow traffic engineers to move from electromagnetic controllers to a system that is completely integrated with its own IT system. With an integrated system, an entire intersection won’t become impacted if a single push-button goes bad. The integrated approach allows each part to remain on track even if there are disturbances in other areas of the system.
With a managed services model, however, agencies no longer have to operate and maintain the equipment or ensure the accuracy of the data. The monitoring can be accomplished by a multipurpose network creating a flowless integration of smart mobility into a Smart City.
The future is now and it’s here. Connected things have moved beyond concept and cities are embracing and adopting smart solutions with ever evolving city-centric applications. Cost savings are a key driver and incentive for many smart city technology deployments. The scope of efficiency improvements across all urban sectors and segment is staggering and amounts to more than US $5T in yearly cost savings globally (ABI Research, 2017).
With a high concentration of people and enterprises across a rapidly increasing number of mega cities, the shift toward urbanization is unlocking a whole new world of opportunity. With the power of services and sharing paradigms, achieving higher asset utilization rates, obtaining economics of scale, and ultimately enabling a more sustainable environment are beginning to materialize on a level never seen before.