Smart City Initiatives

Smart city initiatives are transforming municipalities from coast to coast. Using advanced technology and vast amounts of data, smart city initiatives are designed to enhance the quality of life in urban areas by radically improving management of city services, resources and assets.

Smart city initiatives may include:

• Smart traffic management designed to reduce commute times and alleviate congestion.
• Smart parking programs that identify open spaces on a mobile phone app.
• Smart city street lighting that conserves energy by dimming when lights are not needed.
• Smart building technology that reduces energy consumption through closer monitoring of HVAC, lighting and security systems.
• Smart grid and smart water management programs that deliver energy more effectively and cost-efficiently.
• Smart waste management technology that lets sanitation crews know when bins need to be emptied.
• Visual surveillance that helps law enforcement identify and apprehend criminals.
• Wearable police cameras that improve transparency.
• Monitoring of critical infrastructure, climate and real-time conditions throughout the city to improve public safety, to flag potential issues and to support first responders.

When first implementing smart city initiatives, many municipalities understandably begin with specific technology that can address pressing problems in specific needs. But to reap the most benefit from their investment, truly smart cities begin their journey to smart technology with an overarching plan for developing a unified smart city infrastructure.

What can infrastructure do for smart city initiatives?

When cities implement individual smart technology initiatives without a unifying infrastructure, the results are less than ideal. Ownership and oversight of various smart city initiatives is fractured among different departments. Individual technologies may not integrate easily, preventing the free flow of data throughout city government. Each department will have its own relationship with solution providers and will likely need to implement its own infrastructure, creating costly redundancy.

Alternately, when smart cities have the foresight to implement underlying infrastructure before individual technologies, they can accelerate transformation while saving time, money and effort. Integration and management of various smart city initiatives is easier, and the data developed by one smart city program could be fully utilized to benefit others.

The infrastructure required by smart city initiatives typically includes:

• Sensors and smart cities IoT devices that collect data from a myriad of sources from smart traffic,smart energy, smart monitoring and smart building technology.
• A high-performance network that can handle and transmit vast amounts of data.
• A software analytics platform that aggregates data and extracts actionable intelligence.
• User interfaces that present vital information to residents, businesses and city employees.

While no single vendor can provide all the elements of the technology stack for smart city initiatives, Spectrum Enterprise offers cities a powerful network and access to a vendor ecosystem that can dramatically simplify management of smart city technology.

Spectrum Enterprise: infrastructure solutions for smart city initiatives

Spectrum Enterprise is one of the nation’s largest providers of connectivity solutions to enterprises, institutions and governments, including many existing smart cities. With more than 840,000 miles of digital network infrastructure, Spectrum Enterprise is already ideally positioned to provide critical infrastructure for smart city initiatives. Spectrum will invest another $25 billion over five years to add additional capacity and to serve additional communities.

Spectrum Enterprise enables smart cities to thrive with infrastructure solutions that include:

• A two-way, fully interactive digital network that powers smart city initiatives with symmetrical speeds of up to 100 Gbps.
• One of the country’s largest LTE cellular networks.
• Fiber Internet Access for homes and businesses that provide gigabit connection speeds.
• More than 350,000 WiFi hotspots throughout the U.S. which will soon be capable of delivering wireless speeds of up to 1 Gbps.
• Partnerships with smart technology and smart infrastructure vendors that enable cities to work with a single vendor ecosystem, simplifying management of smart city initiatives.

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