Local Authorities Should Run Fibre And Wireless

Smart cities will need a radical shake up of the way local authorities work with the private sector. Allan Mayo, innovation and smart city strategist at Digital Greenwich told the recent Smart Cities event that should certainly include the ownership of fibre and maybe of spectrum.

The Smart Cities conference run by The Telegraph, was a formal affair  and which brought together the key decision makers and solution providers for cities and towns around the UK.

The importance of 5G wireless was very much to the fore To give the town planners and city strategists a flavour of a typical wireless event Professor Dimitra Simeonidou from the Bristol University smart internet lab talked about how the university had built its test bed not in a lab but in the city centre, and she explained how 5G slicing and virtualisation helped provide the capacity for a million devices per square kilometre.

Much of the conference was about transport, and the key to transport is data. Dan Byles, chairman of Smarter UK, defined the whole of smart cities in terms of travel saying that their role was to “Ease the friction of passengers in their journey through life”. He praised Transport for London for its APIs. By opening its data to app builders TfL has fostered a massive improvement in the way people used transport which one analyst says has helped the London economy to the tune of £200m.

Omid Ashtari explained how Citymapper is going from an app company that looks at data to running transport in its war against the single occupancy car. Citymapper has become incredibly adept at cleaning data, amalgamating it from multiple sources and combining it with data generated from its own users movements and has monitised this with “Smartride” a cross between a bus and a taxi. You don’t book the vehicle but a seat within it, and it doesn’t come to your door but meets you at a street corner close to where you are but without diverting too much from the journey the other occupants are making.

Rupert Walker from Network Rail explained the organisation has come to realise that the start of the journey is the home,  and the destination the end, the station needs to be as frictionless as possible and not have ticket gates. A great new project which will incorporate a lot of smart city technology is Old Oak Common, an area in London at the intersection of HS2 and Crossrail, Tom Cardis is keen to make it as smart a possible. – Forbes