Smart City Networks

The rise of smart city technology is changing the way municipalities around the world are managing city business, assets and resources. Using real-time data collected from sensors and smart cities IoT devices, cities are working to improve everything from transportation and energy efficiency to public safety and civic engagement. Powering this transformation of local governments are smart city networks that can handle the vast amounts of data produced by smart city technology while enabling residences and businesses to access the Internet at gigabit speeds.

The key to successful adoption of smart solutions is establishing a foundation of smart infrastructure before any new smart city project is brought online. Many cities make the mistake of transitioning to smart technology in a piecemeal way, with individual departments investing in smart parking apps, smart meter technology or smart city street lights sensors, for example. This approach often results in silos of smart technology with redundant infrastructure that increase cost and complexity. But cities that begin by putting the right infrastructure in place – smart city networks, data analytics software and intelligent interfaces – can successfully build a comprehensive and integrated foundation where each new smart solution can be easily integrated and where all technologies are interconnected for the free flow of data throughout the city.

Requirements of smart city networks

To connect thousands or millions of sensors and convey the enormous amount of data they generate, smart city networks must provide ultra-reliable, high-performance connectivity that can easily scale to meet future requirements.

Network diversity is essential: the next-generation smart city network must combine a number of technologies – including fiber connections, mobile broadband and low-power wireless technologies – to ensure fast and reliable connections between sensors, analytics platforms and the users who will receive the data.

Some applications such as augmented reality will need the fastest connections with almost zero latency. Other technologies like weather sensors are less sensitive and put less demand on network performance. Some technologies will need broadband wireless access while others must be hardwired to the municipal WAN. Superior smart city networks will easily accommodate this diversity, ensuring performance and reliability as new smart technologies come online and the need for bandwidth grows.

Spectrum Enterprise: fiber solutions for smart city networks

As a premier provider of connectivity solutions for local governments and the nation’s largest enterprises, Spectrum Enterprise serves as a trusted technology partner to many smart cities. With a planned $25 billion nationwide investment in the infrastructure for smart city networks by 2021, Spectrum is ideally positioned to provide connectivity infrastructure for many additional communities throughout the country.

To support the needs of smart city networks, Spectrum Enterprise offers:

• A two-way, fully interactive digital network with over 840,000 miles of infrastructure.
• Symmetrical connection speeds up to 100 Gbps for local governments and enterprise clients.
• Gigabit connections to more than 50 million homes and businesses.
• More than 350,000 Spectrum WiFi hotspots throughout the country that will soon offer wireless speeds of up to 1 Gbps.
• One of the country’s largest LTE cellular networks.

By partnering with Spectrum Enterprise, municipalities can successfully and cost-efficiently build smart city networks that will become the foundation of innovation today and tomorrow.

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