RESILIENT INFRASTRUCTURE
BETTER GOVERNANCE, BETTER LIVELIHOOD, BETTER INDUSTRY BY LUIS GUILLOT
Creating a smart city nervous system.
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t Huawei, we see our smart city as a human brain that has a nervous system that’s a network that extends throughout the city and connects all of the sensors and the gathering information points that a city requires to improve its everyday operations. All those sensors throughout the city are gathered through the network, the nervous system, and it goes to your brain, your data center, where everything is processed. New ICT technologies are making it possible to deploy. The smart streetlight in Latin America was the beacon when smart cities started. They turn on at dusk, turn off at dawn, and if something happens or it’s not working, then it’s fixed or corrected relatively promptly. Fire hydrants are monitored for water pressure. So when the fire department is deployed, they know that the nearest fire hydrant has proper pressure to be useful. These are connected to different types of technology through what we call hybrid networks, which are wireless fiber networks where everything is connected. All the information flows through the network to your data center, where your IoT platform, Geographic Information System, and AI platform process and find correlations to help improve your decision-making. Sensors are one of the most important parts of a smart city because you need to have the capability to grab that information to see what’s happening. In a few Latin American cities, it has been a new trend to create bicycle lanes within normal streets, so everybody started being a little bit more green. In a big city in Latin America, citizens complained about taking space away from
36 | Smart City Miami
the roads for bicyclists. So the city installed sensors to count how many people were using them. They identified that in some parts of the city, bicycle lanes weren’t being used, but in other places, they were really popular. They had the tangible information, not just citizens complaining because they missed wide roads. And I like this example of the smart streetlight because it changed the streetlight the way the smartphone did for the cellular phone. Before, a streetlight was just there to brighten up the night. But today, they’re doing a lot more things with this technology. You can put weather or air quality sensors and Wi-Fi access points. In Mexico City, I believe they have over 25,000 access points throughout the city. In some places, we deployed big monitors that can provide information to citizens about what’s happening or tourist information. Some cities have created a way to get income, and they lease time on those monitors for ads. You can also add emergency buttons or tourist assistant buttons, so if the tourist needs help, they push the button, and they’re connected to the tourist assistant call center. I traveled throughout Latin America, and parking is always a problem. You can embed sensors into the asphalt and communicate wirelessly to your citizens via an app that tells them where a parking space is available. And they can pay for parking through the app. If somebody parks and doesn’t pay, you can send an alert for the meter maid to place a ticket as soon as possible. You can also have a system where you can reserve spaces in a parking garage. There’s a great example of this in Shanghai, where you can reserve your parking space at Disney up to six months in advance. On the day of your visit,
your space opens up, you park, and you start paying. Water is our most pleasurable resource. And through this type of technology in your water system, you can have sensors that can inform your quality, volume, and speed of travel. If something changes, you can detect a possible leak. You can do consumption monitoring instead of sending somebody to measure. You can create better information and faster response to whatever incident has occurred. For all these processes, connectivity is the key. Everything has to be connected to a network. Having those sensors connect to a carrier network and paying your monthly fee eats up your budget. Some cities have deployed technologies like eLTE in a private network managed by the government to prioritize the information; services go faster, you can deploy better services, and you can extend your network and do things like mobile government. Your inspectors connect to your network, so they can do everything on-site without having to come back and retype the information. For a construction inspection, you can have a drone send you live data of what’s happening on the construction site. If you’re going to fix a couple of potholes, you can detect the pothole and deploy your crew who can send you live information. An example that we did in Gaoqing, Shandong, was a very large eLTE private network. They started to provide remote health services to farther regions. They have mobile policing, give traffic tickets, manage their waterworks, and provide better and more reliable water services. This network covers so much of the sea that they even have some smart agriculture solutions with sensors that detect the
