There are only a handful of companies that come to mind when you think of smart cities. Established tech firms like IBM and General Electric have been eagerly promoting intelligent solutions for urban improvement, where machine population encroaches steadily on human residents. Getting these machines to communicate better with each other, as well as with humans, will improve urban living across the board, but it’s not just the abovementioned companies enabling this new world of machine-centric interaction.

When you think about the current technology revolution, at its center is the smartphone. This powerful, handheld computer delivers the world’s information on demand, and can orient your location and environment in detail. Working behind the scenes of smartphone interactivity are the world’s telecoms, and they’ve been exploring data-driven solutions for signal management, advertising, software delivery and many other consumer services that wouldn’t be possible without machine-to-machine capabilities.

The M2M market will provide countless layers of data to contextualize the human experience in cities across the world, enabling the automation of various urban tasks like traffic light management and rerouting public transportation in response to the flux of city dwellers’ movements.   Given the ability to tap into several consumer patterns, from commuting to dining habits, telecoms are key to the evolution of smart cities. Telecoms will only grow their reach as more devices beyond the smartphone become connected. Managing those connection points between machines, and ultimately humans, telecoms not only serve consumers, but the commercial market. Enabling the infrastructure behind data-driven solutions, telecoms service mobile devices and the software applications that run atop them.

Here to discuss how Deutsche Telekom is working on smart cities is Jürgen Hase, the vice president of the M2M Competence Center at Deutsche Telekom AG. He joined Deutsche Telekom AG in 2011 as head of the M2M Competence Center and has been in the telecommunications industry for more than 20 years. He is also chairman of the M2M Alliance, and shares his vision for the city of the near future.

How will M2M technology benefit municipalities? What are the benefits for citizens?

Smart city solutions based on machine-to-machine communication (M2M) provide benefits for both municipalities and citizens. Thanks to the automated data exchange between connected things – such as parking spaces, streetlights or even waste bins – city managers gain a new level of awareness about what is going on in the city. Apart from improving processes such as the maintenance of infrastructure, the newly gained knowledge supports them in handling complex administrative tasks better.

Smart city solutions help municipalities cope with rising populations and sinking budgets. Every smart city solution brings benefits for citizens and contributes its share to make cities more livable. These benefits can be subtle improvements, such as an online service for requesting passports, or more substantial changes, such as less time lost in traffic congestions thanks to smarter mobility concepts.

What type of M2M solutions will help cities improve sustainability?

In a broad sense, every smart city solution aids cities in implementing sustainable structures. The reason is that they make the use of resources transparent, which is a crucial precondition for identifying cost- and resource-saving opportunities. Take street lighting, for example. Conventional street lighting accounts for a large proportion of municipal energy costs. As soon as street lights connect and integrate into a remote management solution, electricity costs can be reduced by 30 to 70 percent and maintenance costs by 10 percent.

Another example of how cities can improve sustainability is via parking and mobility management. Experts estimate that drivers looking for somewhere to park account for 10 to 30 percent of inner city traffic in the U.S. In New York, the number is said to be as high as 45 percent. In light of these figures, smart parking systems are considered to be a mainstay of sustainable inner-city mobility concepts. They lead to better traffic flows, fewer CO2 emissions and less fuel consumption, and they spare drivers the frustrating process of searching for elusive parking places. Suitable solutions are no longer science fiction.

Municipalities are implementing them into city infrastructures worldwide as we speak. Deutsche Telekom and the city of Pisa, Italy are launching a sensor-based guidance system, for example. On Piazza Carrara, less than 700 meters away from the leaning tower, 75 parking spaces are being equipped with sensors. The sensors can detect if the parking spaces are free or occupied and relay this information to a guidance system for drivers. It guides drivers to a free parking space and saves them the trouble of a nerve-wracking manual search.

Will this improve the quality of life for those citizens?

Improving the quality of urban life is an essential requirement of smart city solutions. While they enable city administrations to manage areas such as traffic, lighting, waste disposal and utilities more efficiently, they also enrich the daily lives of citizens in several ways. Many citizen services can be improved, such as requesting resident parking permits.

Some of the benefits are directly noticeable once a smart city solution has been implemented. If drivers find free parking spaces via apps for instance, they save time, experience less stress and reduce their fuel consumption. Connected streetlights ensure that citizens don’t have to be in the dark as a consequence of malfunctioning lights. The intelligent lighting system identifies each malfunction immediately and automatically alerts the maintenance service. Working street lights are seen as an important element for public safety. They prevent accidents and reveal sources of danger.

Additional benefits of smart city solutions are more subtle in the background or may be noticeable in the long run. Pursuing long-term goals, such as ecological sustainability, leads to continuous decreases in negative effects of large cities, such as pollution.

How can cities leverage and analyze the big data collected to improve these solutions?

Cities need to consider the big picture. This is especially true when it comes to data analytics. City managers need to combine data from many different sources in order to unlock the full potential of the smart city. The more patterns and correlations between seemingly unrelated processes that city decision makers can identify, the more insights they’ll have to help them carefully craft directives.

Continual observation of the data collected can predict certain events or actions, such as the best time to conduct maintenance work. Data evaluation is also an important part of Deutsche Telekom’s pilot project with Pisa. Pisa has been using a solution for mobility management for five years. Residents’ parking permits are armed with RFID chips, and RFID gates measure the flow of traffic between districts. Until now, cities and organizations have collected data, but they haven’t evaluated it on a large scale. Deutsche Telekom’s big data service will change that and examine the complete set of historical data and newly created data. The insights cities hope to gain from big data analysis will flow into planning processes around the city’s traffic – just one way that the smart city vision is playing out in today’s global urban centers.

feature photo: Photo Dean via photopin cc

photo: Herr Olsen via photopin cc