Smart City Technology

Smart city technology offers incredible potential benefits for municipalities and their citizens.

• Smart traffic programs can shorten commute times and relieve congestion.
• Smart parking technology lets drivers find open spaces quickly.
• Smart grid and smart water technology conserve resources while delivering utilities more efficiently.
• Smart building technology and smart city street lighting reduce power consumption and improve public safety.
• Monitoring programs for infrastructure, weather, crowds and disaster sites provide real-time feedback on conditions, enabling cities to better protect the public and support first responder efforts.
• Smart kiosk stations throughout public spaces provide information and way finding services.
• Digital interfaces enable residents to access government services more easily.

As more urban areas deploy smart city technology, there’s a temptation to start by spending money on specific smart city solutions that can solve pressing challenges and deliver immediate benefits. But to maximize value and return on investment in smart city technology, municipalities are wise to invest their first dollars in smart infrastructure that can connect, support and power new technologies as they are brought online.

Unifying smart city technology on smart infrastructure

When smart city technology is deployed by individual city departments, the result is a haphazard implementation that results in a patchwork of vendor relationships, redundant infrastructure and smart city technologies that run independently of other smart solutions. Ultimately, this approach mitigates the enormous potential that the smart cities movement represents.

To get the most value from investments in smart city technology, savvy municipalities are investing first in the infrastructure that is required for any smart solution. Smart city technology is typically built on a stack of infrastructure that includes:

• Smart cities IoT devices and sensors that collect an enormous variety of data.
• High-speed and high-bandwidth networks that seamlessly connect smart city technology and convey data.
• Analytics software that pools data, analyzes it and transforms it into actionable intelligence.
• Interfaces that present useful information to residents, businesses and city employees.

By starting their journey to smart city technology with an investment in a unified infrastructure, municipalities can more easily integrate each new technology as it comes online, allow smart technologies to provide data to users across departments, and achieve savings in time, money and effort when deploying and managing smart solutions.

Spectrum Enterprise: investing in the foundation for smart city technology.

Spectrum Enterprise is a leading provider of connectivity solutions for smart cities as well as enterprises and other large institutions. With a wholly owned digital network that exceeds 840,000 miles of fiber connectivity, Spectrum Enterprise is the ideal partner for cities building out smart infrastructure. Spectrum is currently enabling smart city services in many communities and is investing more than $25 billion over five years to lay the foundation for smart technology in many additional cities throughout the U.S.

To support smart city technology, Spectrum Enterprise offers:

• A two-way, fully interactive digital network that can connect smart city technology with symmetrical speeds of up to 100 Gbps.
• Fiber Internet Access for homes and businesses that provide gigabit connection speeds.
• WiFi hotspots throughout the nation that will soon enable wireless connections of up to 1 Gbps.
• One of the nation’s largest LTE cellular networks.

Additionally, Spectrum Enterprise has partnered with a variety of smart city technology vendors to provide a unified vendor ecosystem. Rather than implementing multiple solutions from multiple vendors, cities can make Spectrum Enterprise their sole relationship for managing the entire infrastructure for smart city technology.

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