AHEAD IN THE CLOUD

Cloud-based applications are increasingly underpinning the infrastructure now driving digitalisation. In time, it could even be such Cloud-based solutions that finally give local authorities the confidence they need to embrace future-proofed connected solutions

By Dr Jon Lewis

In our article in last month’s edition, we described how a central management system (CMS) for smart lighting enables significant energy savings whilst making maintenance more efficient and the outdoor environment safer (‘Locally responsive’, vol 86 no 5).

Because of its solid financial case and reliable technology, smart lighting has been a real success story with a vibrant eco-system of suppliers.

Yet, with the success of smart lighting, all of us thought there would be a wave of new sensing applications and our cities would become fully digitised. It didn’t happen that way.

As with many new technologies, the evolutionary path that everybody expects fails to appear, and it is only later that solutions which really work for end users start to emerge.

When smartphones arrived, the perceived wisdom was that voice calls would be replaced by mobile video calls.

Luckily, we don’t all find ourselves

walking down the street, phones outstretched, making video calls. Instead, it transpired that the smartphone was the perfect device for sharing amusing pet moments with our social circle.

It was six years between 3G mobile data services arriving in 2001 and the iPhone launching in 2007 before we started to see the real power of the smartphone. A similar delay between initial expectations and solutions with real value is happening with smart cities.

APPROACHES THAT DIDN’T SCALE

Before looking at how the real promise of smart cities is being realised, let’s look at two approaches that, on the face of it, seemed promising but proved not to be the key elements that cities were looking for.

The first of these is the smart city radio network. For example, the technology Telensa uses for our smart lighting system is called ultra narrowband (UNB). We developed the first generation of this over 20 years ago and the key details have been published in international standards.

About seven years ago similar technologies, notably Sigfox and LoRa, became available under the collective description of lowpower wide-area (LPWA) networks.

The perceived wisdom was that cities could adopt these technologies and attach any device to them for free. In fact, the traditional cellular operators became so worried about the emergence of these technologies that they developed their own competing technologies, such as NB-IOT and LTE-M.

Sigfox goes head-to-head with the cellular companies with its business model; it is a public network with associated tariffs.

UNB and LoRa are usually private networks that give cities the ability to connect devices to their own network at low cost. However, whilst as a private network vendor you might expect us to evangelise this approach over the public network operators, it has become clear to us that cities are not set up to become their own network operators, managing a variety of different device types. In addition, cellular provides a full range of bandwidths, all the way up to the Mbps required for video, that LPWA networks simply cannot provide.

To us, a hybrid approach is emerging as the only practical choice that will enable the widest set of services to thrive. By mixing the cost savings of a technology such as UNB with the flexibility of cellular, cities can match the best technology to each application. Rather than being locked into a single technology, they can ensure they adopt new systems as they arrive.

The arrival of public and private versions of 5G will make this landscape even richer and so it is important that cities put in place a framework for adopting new technology as it becomes available.

Imagine a city that had selected Zigbee ten years ago as its single network technology. First, it would have been severely restricted in terms of the device types it could attach to the network and, second and even worse, would have now found itself with a network that very few vendors continue to provide support.

The second flawed approach was the ‘do it all’ application. We are now seeing vendors in this space scale back their ambitions and even leave the smart city domain altogether.

This approach tried to bring all a city’s operations into a single application, with smart lighting displayed alongside parking availability and healthcare data and so on. This looked great at trade shows, with huge video screens showing the city ‘control room’ of the future; we all looked on with awe.

Again, however, the reality wasn’t quite so enticing. First, the platforms were expensive before you even started to add in any actual applications. Rather than have a choice of applications, cities had to choose from a limited set of vendors that had been selected by the platform vendor. This application selection was not necessarily always in the interest of the end customer.

Co-ordination and timing raised other problems. Whilst one department might have a need for a new system, it was unlikely others had a similar need to move away from their current practices at the same time.

Also, it is unlikely that a user interface that is good for smart lighting also makes sense to the parking department.

Figure 1. This shows how a variety of technologies can have their own sweet spot in terms of suitability

THE EMERGING WAY FORWARD

So, what is the real future? Well let’s go back to our mobile phone analogy. It wasn’t a new radio technology such as 4G that changed everything. It certainly wasn’t a great app from Apple or Google, either. What changed was that Apple and Google concentrated on making an ecosystem grow. This gave consumers a huge choice, as hundreds of apps developers saw value in creating innovative products that they could monetise.

This is what is starting to happen in smart cities. Users are now starting to realise that the key attributes of a smart city system are more about how a given approach acts as an enabler to:

• Allow cities to bring multiple vendors together • Allow departments to pick their own preferred vendors • Enable integration with multiple connectivity solutions in a seamless manner • Provide industry-leading security • Enable easy data sharing but with strict access control

So, who sells this great new system? The reality is that these systems are already all around us so, rather than having to reinvent the wheel, cities can simply use enhancements to an existing infra-structure.

It is the same infrastructure that we already store most of our personal information on, the system that huge systems such as Facebook, Netflix and even the CIA run their systems on – it is of course the Cloud. Hold on, I hear you ask, ‘isn’t the Cloud just for data storage?’. It was, once, but over the last few years the key Cloud companies (chiefly Microsoft and AWS) have enhanced their systems so they have become the

operating systems that web applications run on rather than simply providing storage or server capacity.

Increasingly, applications utilise services running on Microsoft Azure (for example) to manage key elements such as security, data integrity and connectivity. This means that applications don’t need to build all of the key framework elements described above. Instead, they simply adopt the tools provided by the underlying Cloud operating system.

In doing this, it suddenly makes interoperability between applications and data much easier. As more and more applications adopt this approach, then cities can tap into a vibrant ecosystem of suppliers whilst having a common framework to share and manage data.

To use Microsoft Azure as an example again, it has two specific new features worth mentioning that are key to unlocking the promise of smart cities. There are: 1) Digital twin description language (DTDL). This is an open, standards-based language that describes data from the physical environment. So, rather than relying on each individual application to describe physical entities, DTDL will enable different applications to have a common language and so be able to share data.

2) Azure IoT plug and play (IoT PnP). In the same way that printers and other peripherals simply connect to a PC without the need to search for specific drivers, IoT PnP will allow physical sensors to plug into a city’s infrastructure seamlessly with subscriptions, security and connectivity all taken care of. Rather than having to worry about whether a city has selected the correct radio network, this will all be taken care of under the hood.

Telensa, for one, has adopted Microsoft Azure within our UrbanIQ smart city system. However, rather than market this as the solution to all a city’s needs, we are trying to be realistic about the role of individual vendors in cities’ data strategies.

Rather, too, than trying to be everything to everybody, we see UrbanIQ as simply a stepping-stone for cities who want to take control of their own data infra-structure.

This multi-vendor approach is enabled by Cloud solutions in a way that do it all applications could never do.

UrbanIQ provides an easy way to adopt a Cloud-based data strategy but, having got started, cities can take their own course and adopt solutions from hundreds of other vendors running on the same platform.

We would of course love cities to remain engaged with Telensa as they grow on their smart city journey, but we understand cities must remain independent from individual vendors.

So UrbanIQ acts in many ways like a starter kit for adopting a modern Cloudbased data strategy. Figures 2 above shows a simple dashboard that authorities can use to show the status of a number of applications.

This is built on Power-BI, a powerful data visualisation tool that has a large community of developers. This means local companies or universities can engage with the platform, so creating local solutions to local problems.

Figure 2. Two examples of a simple dashboard authorities can use to show the status of a number of applications

MORE OPEN APPROACH

We strongly believe this more open approach to smart cities enabled by the Cloud is the missing element that will give cities the confidence to adopt solutions that are future-proofed. We also hope it will give them the confidence that this approach is underpinned by the some of the largest tech companies in the world.

Having begun the move towards a common framework that is starting to be adopted by an increasing number of vendors, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what is important in terms of the value of individual applications is what actual difference they make to citizens’ lives.

Smart lighting is making a huge difference to the energy budget of local authorities. Having been successful in that domain, at Telensa we are working with some of our key customers on the next set of Cloud-based applications, which we hope will make an equally large difference to city operations.

Dr Jon Lewis is vice president, product, marketing and partners at Telensa

The smart choice for street lighting

PLANet® CMS is the world leader in smart street lighting with over two million control nodes deployed

Contact: David Orchard

UK Sales dorchard@telensa.com 07500 608 205 telensa.com/contact ADVANCED MAPPING INTERFACE provides unique ability to view large deployments on one screen. Includes geo-fencing, colourcoding, filtering & tagging functions. Google Maps enterprise mapping system with satellite & streetview

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