People have been saying for a long time that smart cities will revolutionize how we live. Today’s smart city applications are beginning to prove those predictions to be true. But the real disruption will come with 5G, which is going to transform the city into a dynamic platform that can support a vast array of digital solutions and personalized services.
While the smart city evolution began and will continue with 4G/LTE networks enabling “anywhere broadband connectivity,” 5G will be needed to bring some smart city services to their next level of performance or scale. It will give cities the capacity to seamlessly connect millions of sensors, share rich content amongst users and launch new, digital services. It will enable smarter, more streamlined operations and support rich, real-time human-critical communications for public safety and other critical city services. We also believe that 5G will help create a new generation of digitally enabled services.
4G/LTE provides a direct evolutionary path to 5G. Municipalities that start thinking about how they can benefit from 5G now will be ready to seize future opportunities when needed.
At the heart of 5G is a combination of scalability and extreme performance that will bring significant new capabilities:
Leap #1: data at the speed and scale of city life
Let’s look at an example. Today’s 4G/LTE mobile broadband technology can support dozens of real-time CCTV cameras transmitting in standard or even HD definition. But in the 5G “city as a platform” era, a vast network of cameras and other IoT devices will be utilized to serve a much wider range of functions, demanding new degrees of network scalability and more powerful ways of analyzing the massive volumes of data these additional cameras will produce.
Extreme performance will be essential as more of those devices will be mobile — attached to vehicles, transportation systems and personnel — and used increasingly for applications related to public safety, security and traffic or crowd management or to identify critical citizen needs. Migrating to 5G will allow communities to deploy vast, interlinked, citywide networks of fixed and mobile ultra-high-definition cameras and other sensors with the resolution to track assets, locate stolen vehicles, coordinate hundreds of first responders in real-time, manage crossroads, analyze traffic movements, optimize city assets and more.
Leap #2: Human-critical systems that deliver new levels of performance
As smart city systems become much more sophisticated and involved in critical, real-time automated citywide functions, they’ll need to be more reliable and exhibit lower latency. Today’s 4G latency is a remarkable <10ms.
