Technology empowers cities to respond quickly to demographic and economic shifts, and smarter infrastructure and applications enriches people’s lives. At Nokia, we believe that only responsive, flexible ICT that works for humanity will make smart cities really ‘smart, safe and sustainable’.
Already recently, municipalities around the globe are deploying a broad variety of innovative services and applications to streamline their own operations and to change the urban experience for city dwellers and travellers. A Nokia-sponsored report, The Smart City Playbook by Machina Research, groups Smart City applications and activities under the headings Smart, Safe, and Sustainable the first combination to ‘S’ucceed in the city transformation journey.
Smart: applies to applications that aim to improve the quality of life for citizens, bolstering innovation, social and economic development, and making cities more attractive places to live, visit and do business. Safe: describes applications aimed at helping to prevent, or minimise the risks and impact of, adverse events including crime, accidents, environmental pollution and natural disasters. Sustainable: addresses applications intended to reduce the environmental impact (especially energy consumption and carbon emissions) of the municipality’s own operations and the activities of business which operate within its jurisdiction and citizens who live there. On the other hand, sustainability means also selecting the right business model to fund, invest and cost-efficiently manage the innovations for now and the future.
The need for a shared, secure, and scalable infrastructure
Smart cities are built on smart networks and smart platforms. The technology choices that governments and city councils make today are creating the foundation for how our cities will operate tomorrow. And, although most implementations differ primarily in their emphasis on a few key domains, all point to the use of connectivity infrastructure and IoT platforms to address the respective challenges and opportunities. Nokia is a global leader in the technologies that connect people and things. With state-of-the-art software, hardware, and services for any type of network, we are uniquely positioned to help smart cities deliver on the promise of 5G, gigabit networking, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (based upon LPWAN sensor networks.) We equip them with the network, the platform and the ecosystem to improve the quality of life of their citizens, foster their economic growth, create opportunities for new development and infrastructure renewal, and support eco-sustainability initiatives.
