5G Can Enable Smart Cities — If Policymakers Allow It

Many cities are striving to become “smart” — communities at the forefront of using data, sensors and connected devices to improve government services and residents’ quality of life through analytics and automation. Smart cities promise to deliver notable advances, such as less roadway congestion from smart traffic signals, more effective health and safety inspections with predictive analytics, and more transparency with real-time dashboards showing citizens when to expect the next snowplow or garbage truck to come through their neighborhood. 

But for most cities, especially those in the U.S., becoming a fully functioning smart city is a dream still only on the horizon. While many have launched important smart city initiatives, these tend to be one-off projects instead of fully integrated smart city efforts that modernize city governments from top to bottom. Yet comprehensive smart city efforts are necessary to fully extract the value that data analytics can deliver to government.

One step cities can take to come closer to realizing their vision of becoming a smart city is accelerating the deployment of 5G wireless networks. 5G, which offers faster connections, more reliability and greater capacity at lower costs, will enable cities to better connect their infrastructure, devices and people. Moreover, compared to the current 4G standard, 5G offers the capacity to enable additional smart city capabilities, and it will be a prerequisite to enable various high-bandwidth and low-latency smart city applications. For example, 5G will support the wide-scale deployment of connected vehicles communicating with traffic signals to reduce traffic as well as the deployment of large numbers of sensors to measure in real timethe safety of infrastructure such as water pipes, highways and buildings. 

For cities to reach this potential sooner rather than later, however, they will need to accelerate the deployment and adoption of 5G. One way is for cities to streamline their permitting processes. 5G uses small cells that can transmit data faster but not as far as the towers of past wireless networks. As a result, the number of small cell installations needed to fully implement 5G is expected to be 10 to 100 times the number of existing cell towers.