Our progress in the smart city of St. Petersburg, Florida and lessons learned along the way.

Twenty-three months ago, in partnership with US Ignite and the St. Pete Innovation District, we announced St. Petersburg, Florida as a Smart Gigabit Community. This announcement marked the beginning of a collaborative effort to deliver smart city projects that will encourage job growth, economic development, and a higher quality of life for the citizens of the Sunshine City.

We, at Spectrum Enterprise, were responsible for spearheading the approach, pulling in the right partners, and implementing the fiber network infrastructure. After months of great collaboration, we’re excited to share our progress and some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Come together to make a plan

One of the first steps we took was to come together and sit down as a group to brainstorm a list of potential smart city projects to tackle. We knew there were some really interesting use cases where smart city technology could be valuable but we didn’t have any predisposed ideas on where to start. Ultimately, we agreed on three projects: smart lighting, smart intersections, and a marine science project.

Smart lighting is just the jumping off point

One of the first pilot projects we kicked off was to implement a Smart Lighting solution throughout the city. The beauty of smart lighting solutions is that it offers more than improving energy efficiency—it offers a jumping off point for other smart city solutions. A light pole can be fitted with a wide array of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices to improve public safety, enable environmental monitoring and more. By installing smart lighting, city leaders can extrapolate into other solutions in the future and integrate the data from those additional sensors to drive even more learnings for the city.

Practice makes perfect

The more implementations we make, the more we learn. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. With each implementation we’re learning the setup necessary, the validations required, and how to work with different groups within the city. For instance, we’re giving the University of Florida St. Petersburg access to the data and our learnings so they can bring it into a classroom and integrate it into their curriculum.

We were also able to work with different groups within the university to help them augment their current systems to close coverage gaps. For the smart intersection project, for example, we implemented a solution and then took a step back and looked at it more closely. We came to the conclusion that if we collect data and develop a baseline first, we can better tailor the solution to fit the need.

Open communication is key

The open collaboration and trusted partnership between St. Petersburg and Spectrum Enterprise is key to our success. There are a number of ways to tackle a problem, but we also don’t want to jump to a conclusion. So, the team has maintained an open line of communication throughout the process. We discuss the problems at hand and then collectively hone in on the best way to move forward.

The quality of the relationships and the trust we have established with the St. Pete Innovation District, US Ignite, and other partners involved in the project is what has allowed us to make the progress we’ve made in such a short amount of time. I look forward to sharing more updates in the future.

To learn more about our work with smart cities, contact us.