Llewellyn King: The digital takeover of cities
Varieties of lighting circa 1900.
Representation of a “smart” (digitized) city.
Benjamin Franklin was the first to deploy street lighting. He put candles in a four-sided, glass case for his lights. The engineering took a giant leap forward in England, when William Murdoch lit his home with coal gas lights in 1792.
Today street lighting is taken as a given, like sewage systems. But it’s also one of the building blocks for the cities of the future, known as “smart cities.”
In Bedford, Mass., a company called CIMCON Lighting has developed a controller node, which is the size and shape of a brioche loaf of bread and sits atop a light pole. The node isn’t big, but it packs a lot of functions beyond controlling the LED light. It’s Wi-Fi-equipped and is in constant wireless communications with its own network and with the city or county management structure. It has a camera, which can be used for crime control; more apps can be added.
Smart city advocate Pete Tseronis, formerly chief technology officer at the Department of Energy, says that in today’s context “smart” means connected; things that speak to other things.
By that measure the CIMCON Lighting device, or controller, is mighty talkative. The company calls it NearSky and says it enables “the internet of outdoor things.”
To me, it’s an outlier of things to come. Smart cities are the precursor to big changes in everything from transportation to entertainment, from food delivery to garbage control.
CIMCON Lighting believes that its technology is a gateway to the smart cities concept which cities around the world are headed toward, some with accelerated political involvement.
In fact, the race to be smart is on and cities from San Antonio to London, and Boston to Singapore are already out of the blocks. It’s going to get giddy.
Old controllers on lights turn them on and off, and sometimes dim them. CIMCON Lighting and the new generation of controllers are little Napoleons, controlling everything they see and much that they don’t. The controller sitting modestly on a street light will be in the vanguard of the revolution which will encompass the whole city.
The electric utilities, the technology companies (like Google, Amazon and IBM) and the telephone giants (like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile) all are interested in seizing the lead in the new city space. Their interest goes way beyond things like street lighting to the very command-and-control of cities, from routine police dispatch to disaster management. The old-line companies are wary of what Amazon, Google and Facebook might do in the smart city space.
These big techs are looking past simply managing old infrastructure through digitization, to a new world of automated cars, remote home deliveries, intercity trucking and charging electric vehicles.
The telephone companies are hinging their participation on their 5G networks, which they are rolling out in fits and starts. The electric utilities believe that they have something of a leg up because they’ve been working on making the electrical grid smart for a decade and that it’s now far-advanced with a lot of demand controlled by the customer, not the vendor: a smart city selling point.
Morgan O’Brien, a co-founder and chairman of Nextel Communications, and himself a giant in the telecommunications industry, says the current telephone standard, LTE (Long-Term Evolution), is strong enough to start the revolution and in due course 5G will fit in.
O’Brien is now vice chairman of pdvWireless, which has developed a private system for electric utilities’ communication with a dedicated spectrum to secure it. This has evolved from a suite of workplace wireless communications tools. O’Brien told me he believes you must look to companies -- possibly post-merger ones -- which have the technology, capital and ambition to conquer the smart cities market to identify the likely movers and shakers. Of course, pdvWireless hopes to be in there, he said.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler describes 5G as a “huge pipe” that will have such capacity for communications and handling vast amounts of data that it’ll itself bring about a mini-revolution. Wheeler worked on getting and keeping the military up to speed on evolving digital technology.
There are more than 19,000 cities and counties that operate as cities in the United States, and more than 50,000 in the world. So the companies are salivating over a gigantic market, almost unimaginably tempting.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: The rush to become 'smart cities' is on around the world
View toward the waterfront of Boston, considered the second “smartest’’ city in America, after New York.
Ireland was a country that thought, before the 1990s, that could not compete. Its rail system was primitive, its ports were outdated and small, and its roads were problematic — mostly you had to share them with sheep or tractors hauling peat wagons.
It looked as though Ireland was doomed to be one of the least competitive countries in Europe and would continue to have “structural” unemployment of 20 percent and higher.
Then a miracle: Ireland combined its greatest assets — literacy and superior education system — with the computer revolution, and it became a boom country. Ireland, rather than depending on exporting bacon, butter and linens, started exporting services by internet.
It became a computing center for Europe, and American and Asian companies flooded in. Galway, a university town, was ground zero for top computer companies.
Ireland went from nowhere to wearing the crown of “Celtic Tiger.” Businesses around computing, and those serving the foreign executives, boomed. Ireland shook off the dead weight of centuries.
There are lessons in the Irish experience for cities as they struggle to become “smart cities” and to compete as the smartest cities in livability and business friendliness. Can some ailing Midwest or city in Upstate New York burst the bonds of their Rust Belt past and find new futures as smart cities, attracting investment and technology-based business?
Largely unseen, cities from Rochester, N.Y., to San Antonio are seeking the title, even though the full dimensions of what makes a city smart are still being thrashed out.
A global study, undertaken by the Singapore-based Eden Strategy Institute, puts London at No. 1 and Singapore at No. 2 in the world. New York leads in the United States, closely followed by Boston; Rochester, N.Y., is on the list. Out of 50 world cities, just 12 U.S. cities make the list.
But many U.S. cities are in the race to be the super-smart, from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to San Antonio. Smart cities are a place where the old world of bricks and mortar meets the new world of artificial intelligence.
The players, besides the cities themselves, are the telephone giants (especially AT&T and Verizon), the electric utilities, a wide variety of software vendors and consultants. They are vying with each other for business at the city and county level.
The telephone companies are hoping to use their emerging 5G technology as the way in which machines and systems will talk to each other. IBM is interested in all aspects of the city of the future, including the use of blockchain as the primary record-keeper. Amazon wants to begin smart deliveries, maybe by drone.
Even law firms — and Dentons, the world’s largest, is out front — will be needed to write the contracts and guide their clients. Clinton Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, says the firm has taken the unusual step of establishing a “think tank” within the firm to work on smart cities.
Smart cities implementation needs local political approval and encouragement; the action is in the city councils and mayors’ offices, and county boards, not in Washington.
As with so many things, it is technology that may change our lives as much or more than policy. Already, the effect of computing in the way we live in cities can be seen everywhere — from those pesky scooters that are on the streets of many cities, and which rely on computer networks and GPS, to Uber and Lyft ride-sharing and Airbnb.
Down the road, smart technologies will have to decide how electric cars are to be charged and where; how autonomous vehicles will operate in cities and where they will park themselves between assignments.
The building blocks are electricity and telephony. They will also be the managers of the old infrastructure, surveilling pipelines, water systems, roads and even traffic lights. The idea is to slave the old infrastructure to the new infrastructure for efficiency and instant response to problems.
Some cities will lead, but none will be unaffected. Smart is coming fast and will be here to stay. Will those who do not catch the wave become “stupid cities”?
Llewellyn King, based in Washington and Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2