2012 Global Telecoms - Smart Cities and Artificial Intelligence

Societies to be based on smart technology

BuddeComm’s annual publication Global Telecoms – Smart Societies and Artificial Intelligence, provides the key global trends and insights for these important and interesting sectors which will form the communities of the future.

In our complex societies, developments do not take place in isolation; they need to be looked at within a broader context and policies, strategies and activities need to be comprehensively linked. This is perhaps best described under the title ‘smart city’ or ‘smart community’.

Making infrastructure smart basically means adding intelligence to the networks through sensors, devices, M2M, etc  that generate reliable data that can be processed in real time to provide information to all those involved in making decisions about their energy use, transport movement, weather conditions, financial status, healthcare monitoring etc.

By combining these databases in a trans-sector way – linking energy to traffic to healthcare, to weather, to economics – we will be able to move from the current silo-based structure to a true trans-sector structure.

In the context of the global crisis, we must now look at every opportunity to build smarter communities. The next stage of human evolution is going to depend on merging humans and machines, something that is becoming increasingly possible through artificial intelligence (AI).

Smart communities should incorporate cross-sector public safety, carbon neutral, state of the art communications networks, linked to a new generation of social services provided by government, such as e-government, e-health and e-education. Smart Transport systems are also integral to a smart society.

Smart Transport, better known as Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), increase the safety and efficiency of transport networks – from public bus, tram and train transport, to rail and road freight transport, and private and commercial road transport. ITS systems include the software and hardware for new electronic vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication/information systems.

In 2012 there are now a number of countries around the world whose governments are actively investigating the social and economic benefits that can be achieved through the deployment of a mainly fibre-based broadband telecoms infrastructure.

The United Nations has also earmarked broadband as critical infrastructure in its Millennium Development Goals. ICT will not solve the problem of world hunger, but it cannot be solved without ICT, and this equally applies to all the other challenges.

Smart infrastructure is necessary for the smart societies of the future based on smart economies, e-health, smart grids, smart transport, e-education, e-commerce and smart energy.

Market Highlights

• Citizens are using smart tools to address, in their own way, the challenges that they are facing, either individually or together as a community;
• In many cities around the world, high density living is the norm and attention is now turning towards making this style of living more sustainable;
• Technology innovations include water harvesting and re-use, solar collection and energy efficient appliances including heating and cooling; Sustainable urban transport systems are also on the agenda for many governments.
• E-health has become an area where key killer applications that utilise truly high-speed broadband networks are emerging and is one example of how broadband is important for social reasons beyond Internet access.
• Smart city developments are taking place in hundreds of cities around the world with initiatives ranging from solar panel installation; electronic vehicle use; extensive fibre optic deployment and real-time data collection used for city governance and traffic management.

Data in this report is the latest available at the time of preparation and may not be for the current year.