Smart Building

Smart buildings are a high-priority for municipalities transitioning to smart city technology. Using sensors, data and analytics, smart building solutions enable a facilities manager to monitor conditions continually, manage operations easily and improve the experience of tenants and visitors. Because local governments are often among the largest owners of nonresidential buildings within a city, the savings that smart building technology yields can significantly benefit city finances. 

Smart building technology is designed to address a number of operational challenges, including:

• Managing rising utility costs.
• Extending the lifecycle of facility assets.
• Ensuring protection of property and safety for tenants and visitors.
• Complying with evolving building codes and regulations.
• Ensuring environmental sustainability.

Smart building technology addresses these challenges with IoT sensors that enable a facility to monitor its own environment, reacting to real-time data as well as historical trends. When outfitted with this technology, smart buildings allow a city to:

• Reduce energy related expenses.
• Eliminate water waste by identifying malfunctioning plumbing fixtures.
• Proactively manage and maintain assets to avoid unfortunate outages of central systems such as HVAC, refrigeration units and elevators.
• Stop unauthorized access to facilities.
• Adhere to local code requirements for air and water quality.
• Prevent cybersecurity breaches that may target the building automation system (BAS) or building management system (BMS).
• Identify occupancy trends to plan more effectively for maintenance needs.

Smart building components and functions

Smart building solutions are built on a technology stack that is common to all smart city solutions. This includes:

• A collection of sensors that monitor everything from power consumption to the conditions of building assets and the movement of tenants and visitors.
• A network that can connect thousands of IoT sensors and convey the data they produce to a central BAS/BMS or to city managers. 
• Data analytics software that aggregates sensor data and transforms it to produce actionable intelligence.
• User interfaces that provide building managers and city planners with useful information for improving management of buildings and assets.

Connectivity is essential for any smart city framework. A smart building network provider must offer a range of connectivity protocols including wired, wireless and cellular, as well as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), WiFi and other networking protocols. And the ever-present threats to cybersecurity means that cities must choose network providers with deep experience in network security and the risks inherent in smart building solutions.

Spectrum Enterprise: network infrastructure for smart buildings

For cities looking for a network partner for smart building, smart city waste management or smart city lighting solutions, Spectrum Enterprise provides a highly robust and secure network with two-way, fully digital connectivity with symmetrical speeds up to 100 Gbps. Spectrum has a nationwide footprint with more than 840,000 miles of fiber connections and is investing another $25 billion by 2021 to expand capacity and capabilities.

As a smart city infrastructure partner, Spectrum Enterprise also offers:

• More than 350,000 WiFi hotspots throughout the U.S. that will soon be capable of wireless connection speeds up to 1 Gbps.
• One of the largest LTE cellular networks in the nation.
• Gigabit connections for homes and businesses throughout the Spectrum service area.

Learn more about Spectrum Smart Cities at www.spectrumsmartcities.com.