Page 108 - SAMENA Trends - November-December 2019

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

ARTICLE

The Role of 5G in Enabling Smart Cities

Smart cities will typically have a large
number of installed sensors and devices
with a high density. And 5G will deliver
the mass connectivity to enable the
deployment of millions of these devices,
such as sensors required for a smart city

to collate crucial data from different utility
systems as well as support the connection
density and capacity density required.

It seems that 5G rollout gets bigger and faster each day. This
once-in-a-decade upgrade will leap ahead of current wireless
technology, 4G, by enabling mobile internet speeds that will
pave the way for a new generation of highly reliable, real-time,
automated services like the internet of things and smart cities.

But there continue to be a number of questions and unknowns
about how 5G will actually work. As a 5G specialist who’s been
right in the thick of the development of this new technology
standard, I get asked a lot of the same questions about the
new services that 5G will bring, and how everyone from mobile
operators, to nontechnology companies, to consumers will begin
to make use of 5G. In this article, I’d like to share a few of these Pradeep Bhardwaj
answers as they specifically relate to smart cities. Senior Strategy Director and Head of
Industry Standards
How do you see 5G changing the way that smart cities evolve? Syniverse
Smart cities have already started to become a reality to some
extent, because when we say “smart,” we mean data-driven,
interconnected and intelligent. It implies collection of data from
installed sensors, analysis of a vast amount of data, simulation
of data in virtual environments, and then application of the results
into real-world assets to optimize performance of these assets.
The more data we have to analyze, the more accurate our insight is,
and the better our ability is to make our cities run more efficiently.
Although we’ve started to make our cities smart by implementing,
for example, automated traffic systems to improve traffic flow, or
cameras and analytics to increase efficiency, it’s the arrival of 5G
that will allow us to take these to the next level. 5G will become
the unifying technology fabric that enables connectivity for these
sensor devices.

108 NOVEMBER 2019