Smart Infrastructure: Is the next IoT revolution on the right trajectory?

In early 2015, the Indian government announced plans to turn 100 of the country’s cities into “smart cities.” The idea was to leverage cloud technology, IoT, and big data in order to rethink waste management, traffic, electricity, and other city infrastructures. Smart city initiatives have been proposed or launched all over the world in the past few years. Cities like Singapore, Helsinki, Nairobi, and New York City are all in the midst of it.

But these cities are encountering a huge obstacle in their first attempts at becoming a smart city: a lack of concerted planning, communication, and collaboration.

The Way to Smart Cities Is Through Connected Infrastructure

At this point, the smart infrastructure movement is disparate. Companies building these smart solutions see their products as autonomous. But for the cities trying to integrate these systems, nothing could be further from the truth.

A truly smart city will communicate seamlessly. Different technologies and products made by different companies have to speak the same language and play by the same rules. But at this early stage in the IoT movement, most companies creating these technologies are waiting for standards to make them more integrated and collaborative.

That’s what we’re doing at Intel: finding ways to unite more of the players in the space. We’re stepping back with a product-agnostic approach, watching the market, and looking for best solutions and products. Based on what we find and what customers need, we’re then making connections between players in the ecosystem. We’re looking for and influencing designs and standards that are future-proof, sustainable, and scalable.

The Factors at Play

Here’s an example: A city decides they want to install smart traffic or weather cameras on the streets. The city can go about pulling the data from the camera in several ways. They could do it right away, at the camera itself. In other words, the camera catches the activity, as it has the intelligence built in to process the data and send an alert to the right authority. Or the city could set it up as a “dumb” camera. That means the camera simply captures the images and then sends them all the way back to the data center in a centralized location, where the information is processed and alerts are sent out.

For a city trying to find the right products, dozens of factors must be considered before they make a decision. What’s the Internet infrastructure like in their city? How expensive is it to send the data back and forth? What does it cost to use hardware that can process the data on-site? And that’s on top of the challenges we discussed above, namely how the different pieces of technology within the product itself speak to one another and how the software analyzes the data.

In order to make good choices and create truly smart infrastructure, we need to consider each city’s needs and the solutions out there. And in order to do that, these cities need some help from advisors who are truly product-agnostic.

Because of the many different products Intel makes, the company has been working closely with original design manufacturers (or ODMs) in nearly every area of tech for the last 50 years. It’s given us a deeper understanding of these brands, their products, technology roadmaps, and the ways smart infrastructure can be successfully implemented.

In future posts, we’ll be delving deeper into the challenges smart cities are facing as they implement more IoT solutions. Has your city tried integrating any smart technology into the infrastructure? How did it go?

Kavitha Mohammad is the Director of Sales for Intel IoT and SmartCities, in the Asia Pacific Japan region. Follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.