These so-called smart city initiatives are exploiting open, wide area networking (WAN) technologies to make urban life richer in services, safer, and far more responsive to residences’ needs. We will now learn how such pervasively connected and data-driven IoT architectures are helping cities in India vastly improve the quality of life there.
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Here to share how communication service providers have become agents of digital urban transformation are VS Shridhar, Senior Vice President and Head of the Internet-of-Things Business Unit at Tata Communications in Chennai area, India, and Nigel Upton, General Manager of the Universal IoT Platform and Global Connectivity Platform and Communications Solutions Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Tell us about India’s Smart Cities mission. What are
you up to and how are these new technologies coming to bear on improving urban
quality of life?
Shridhar: The
government is clearly focusing on Smart Cities as part of their urbanization
plan, as they believe Smart Cities will not only improve the quality of living,
but also generate employment, and take the whole country forward in terms of technologically
embracing and improving the quality of life.
So with that in mind, the Government of India has launched 100
Smart Cities initiatives. It’s quite interesting because each of the cities
that aspire to belong had to make a plan and their own strategy around how they
are going to evolve and how they are going to execute it, present it, and get
selected. There was a proper selection process.
Many of the cities made it, and of course some of them
didn’t make it. Interestingly, some of the cities that didn’t make it are
developing their own plans.
There is lot of excitement and curiosity as well as action
in the Smart Cities project. Admittedly, it’s a slow process, it’s not
something that you can do at the blink of the eye, and Rome wasn’t built
overnight, but I definitely see a lot of progress.
Gardner:
Nigel, it seems that the timing for this is auspicious, given that there are
some foundational technologies that are now available at very low cost compared
to the past, and that have much more of a pervasive opportunity to gather
information and make a two-way street, if you will, between the edge and central
administration. How is the technology evolution synching up with these Smart Cities
initiatives in India?
Upton:
I am not sure whether it’s timing or luck, or whatever it happens to be, but
adoption of the digitization of city infrastructure and services is to some
extent driven by economics. While I like to tease my colleagues in India about
their sensitivity to price, the truth of the matter is that the economics of
digitization -- and therefore IoT in smart cities -- needs to be at the right
price, depending on where it is in the world, and India has some very specific
price points to hit. That will drive the rate of adoption.
And so, we're very encouraged that innovation is continuing
to drive price points down to the point that mass adoption can then be taken up,
and the benefits realized to a much more broad spectrum of the population. Working
with Tata Communications has really helped HPE understand this and continue to
evolve as technology and be part of the partner ecosystem because it does take
a village to raise an IoT smart city. You need a lot of partners to make this
happen, and that combination of partnership, willingness to work together and driving
the economic price points to the point of adoption has been absolutely critical
in getting us to where we are today.
Balanced Bandwidth
Gardner:
Shridhar, we have some very important optimization opportunities around things
like street lighting, waste removal, public safety, water quality; of course,
the pervasive need for traffic and parking, monitoring and improvement.
How do things like a low-power specification Internet and
network gateways and low-power WANs (LPWANs) create a new foundation
technically to improve these services? How do we connect the services and the
technology for an improved outcome?
Shridhar:
If you look at human interaction to the Internet, we have a lot of technology coming
our way. We used to have 2G, that has moved to 3G and to 4G, and that is a lot
of bandwidth coming our way. We would like to have a tremendous amount of
access and bandwidth speeds and so on, right?
 |
| Shridhar |
In order to switch off a streetlight, how much bandwidth do
you actually require? Or, in order to sense temperature or air quality or water
and water quality, how much bandwidth do you actually require?
When you ask these questions, you get an answer that the
machines don’t require that much bandwidth. More importantly, when there are
millions -- or possibly billions -- of devices to be deployed in the years to
come, how are you going to service a piece of equipment that is telling a
streetlight to switch on and switch off if the battery runs out?
Machines are different from humans in terms of interactions.
When we deploy machines that require low bandwidth and low power consumption, a
battery can enable such a machine to communicate for years.
Aside from heavy video streaming applications or constant
security monitoring, where low-bandwidth, low-power technology doesn’t work,
the majority of the cases are all about low bandwidth and low power. And these machines
can communicate with the quality of service that is required.
When it communicates, the network has to be available. You then
need to establish a network that is highly available, which consumes very
little power and provides the right amount of bandwidth. So studies show that
less than 50 kbps connectivity should suffice for the majority of these
requirements.
Now the machine interaction also means that you collect all
of them into a platform and basically act on them. It's not about just sensing
it, it's measuring it, analyzing it, and acting on it.
Low-power to the people
So the whole stack consists not just of connectivity alone.
It’s LPWAN technology that is emerging now and is becoming a de facto standard
as more-and-more countries start embracing it.
At Tata Communications we have embraced the LPWAN technology
from the LoRa Alliance, a
consortium of more than 400 partners who have gotten together and are driving standards. We are creating this network over the
next 18 to 24 months across India. We have made these networks available right
now in four cities. By the end of the year, it will be many more cities -- almost
60 cities across India by March 2018.
Gardner: Nigel, how do you see the opportunity, the market,
for a standard architecture around this sort of low-power, low-bandwidth
network? This is a proof of concept in India, but what's the potential here for
taking this even further? Is this something that has global potential?
Upton: The global potential is undoubtedly there, and there
is an additional element that we didn't talk about which is that not all
devices require the same amount of bandwidth. So we have talked about video
surveillance requiring higher bandwidth, we have talked about devices that have
low-power bandwidth and will essentially be created once and forgotten when
expected to last 5 or 10 years.
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 |
| Upton |
The real advantage of being able
to use a common architecture to be able to take the data from these devices is
the idea of having things like a common management, common security, and a common
data model so that you really have the power of being able to take information,
take data from all of these different types of devices and pull it into a
common platform that is based on a standard.
In our case, we selected the oneM2M standard, it’s the best standard available
to be able to build that common data model and that's the reason why we
deployed the oneM2M model within the universal IoT platform to get that
consistency no matter what type of device over no matter what type of network.
Gardner: It certainly sounds like this is an unprecedented
opportunity to gather insight and analysis into areas that you just really
couldn't have measured before. So going back to the economics of this, Shridhar,
have you had any opportunity through these pilot projects in such cities as
Jamshedpur to demonstrate a return on investment, perhaps on street lighting,
perhaps on quality of utilization and efficiency? Is
there a strong financial incentive to do this once the initial hurdle of
upfront costs is met?
Data-driven cost reduction lights up India
Unless
the customer sees that there is a scope for either reducing the cost or
increasing the customer experience, they are not going to buy these
kinds of solutions.
Shridhar:
Unless the customer sees that there is a scope for either
reducing the cost or increasing the customer experience, they are not going to
buy these kinds of solutions. So if you look at how things have been
progressing, I will give you a few examples of how the costs have started
constructing and playing out. One of course is to have devices, meeting at
certain price point, we talked about how in India -- we talked that Nigel was
remarking how constant still this Indian market is, but it’s important, once we
delivered to a certain cost, we believe we can now deliver globally to scale. That’s
very important, so if we build something in India it would deliver to the
global market as well.
The streetlight example, let’s take that specifically and
see what kind of benefits it would give. When a streetlight operates for about
12 hours a day, it costs about Rs.12, which is about $0.15, but when you start
optimizing it and say, okay, this is a streetlight that is supported currently
on halogen and you move it to LED, it brings a little bit of cost saving, in
some cases significant as well. India is going through an LED revolution as you
may have read in the newspapers, those streetlights are being converted, and
that’s one distinct cost advantage.
Now they are looking and driving, let’s say, the usage and
the electricity bills even lower by optimizing it. Let’s say you sync it with
the astronomical clock, that 6:30 in the evening it comes up and let’s say 6:30
in the morning it shuts down linking to the astronomical clock because now you are
connecting this controller to the Internet.
The second thing that you would do is during busy hours keep
it at the brightest, let’s say between 7:00 and 10:00, you keep it at the
brightest and after that you start minimizing it. You can control it down in 10
percent increments.
The point I am making is, you basically deliver intensity of
light to the kind of requirement that you have. If it is busy, or if there is
nobody on the street, or if there is a safety requirement -- a sensor will trigger
up a series of lights, and so on.
So your ability to play around with just having streetlight
being delivered to the requirement is so high that it brings down total cost.
While I was telling you about $0.15 that you would spend per streetlight, that
could be brought down to $0.05. So that’s the kind of advantage by better controlling
the streetlights. The business case builds up, and a customer can save 60 to 70
percent just by doing this. Obviously, then the business case stands out.
The question that you are asking is an interesting one
because each of the applications has its own way of returning the investment
back, while the optimization of resources is being done. There is also a
collateral positive benefit by saving the environment. So not only do I gain a business
savings and business optimization, but I also pass on a general, bigger message
of a green environment. Environment and safety are the two biggest benefits of
implementing this and it would really appeal to our customers.
Gardner:
It’s always great to put hard economic metrics on these things, but Shridhar
just mentioned safety. Even when you can't measure in direct economics, it's
invaluable when you can bring a higher degree of safety to an urban
environment.
It opens up for more foot traffic, which can lead to greater
economic development, which can then provide more tax revenue. It seems to me
that there is a multiplier effect when you have this sort of intelligent urban
landscape that creates a cascading set of benefits: the more data, the more
efficiency; the more efficiency, the more economic development; the more
revenue, the more data and so on. So tell us a little bit about this ongoing
multiplier and virtuous adoption benefit when you go to intelligent urban
environments?
Quality of life, under control
Upton:
Yes, also it’s important to note that it differs almost by country to country
and almost within region to region within countries. The interesting challenge
with smart cities is that often you're dealing with elected officials rather
than hard-nosed businessman who are only interested in the financial return.
And it's because you're dealing with politicians and they are therefore
representing the citizens in their area, either their city or their town or
their region, their priorities are not always the same.
There is quite a variation of one of the particular
challenges, particular social challenges as well as the particular quality of
life challenges in each of the areas that they work in. So things like personal
safety are a very big deal in some regions. I am currently in Tokyo and here
there is much more concern around quality of life and mobility with a rapidly
aging population and their challenges are somewhat different.
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Gardner:
Shridhar, do you have any other input into a cascading ongoing set of benefits
when you get more data, more network opportunity. I guess I am trying to
understand for a longer-term objective that being intelligent and data-driven
has an ongoing set of benefits, what might those be? How can this be a
long-term data and analytics treasure trove when you think about it in terms of
how to provide better urban experiences?
Home/work help
Shridhar:
From our perspective, when we looked at the customer benefits there is a huge
amount of focus around the smart cities and how smart cities are benefiting
from a network. If you look at the enterprise customers, they are also looking
at safety, which is an overlapping application that a smart city would have.
So the enterprise wants to provide safety to its workers,
for example, in mines or in difficult terrains, environments where they are
focusing on helping them. Or women’s safety, which is as you know in India is a
big thing as well -- how do you provide a device which is not very obvious and it
gives the women all the safety that is there.
So all this in some form is providing data. One of the
things that comes to my mind when you ask about how data-driven resources can
be and what kind of quality it would give is if you action your mind to some of
the customer services devices, there could be applications or let’s say a
housewife could have a multiple button kind of a device where she can order a
service.
Depending on the service she presses and an aggregate of
households across India, you would know the trends and direction of a certain
service, and mind you, it could be as simple as a three-button device which says
Service A, Service B, Service C, and it could be a consumer service that gets extended
to a particular household that we sell it as a service.
So you could get lots of trends and patterns that are
emerging from that, and we believe that the customer experience is going to
change, because no longer is a customer going to retain in his mind what kind
of phone numbers or your, let's say, apps and all to order, you give them the
convenience of just a button-press service. That immediately comes to my mind.
Feedback fosters change
The second one is in terms of feedback. You use the same
three-button service to say, how well have you used utility -- or rather how --
what kind of quality of service that you rate multiple utilities that you are using,
and there is toilet revolution in India. For example, you put these buttons out
there, they will tell you at any given point of time what’s the user
satisfaction and so on.
So these are all data that is getting gathered and I believe
that while it is early days for us to go on and put out analytics and give you
distinct kind of benefits that are there, but some of the things that customers
are already looking at is which geographies, which segment, who are my biggest
-- profile of the customers using this and so on. That kind of information is
going to come out very, very distinctly.
The Smart Cities is all about experience. The enterprises
are now looking at the data that is coming out and seeing how they can use it
to better segment, and provide better customer experience which would obviously
mean both adding to their top line as well as helping them manage their bottom
line. So it's beyond safety, it's getting into the customer experience – the realm
of managing customer experience.
Gardner:
From a go-to-market perspective, or a go-to-city’s perspective, these are very
complex undertakings, lots of moving parts, lots of different technologies and
standards. How are Tata and HPE are coming together -- along with other service
providers, Pointnext
for example? How do you put this into a package that can then actually be
managed and put in place? How do we make this appealing not only in terms of
its potential but being actionable as well when it comes to different cities
and regions?
Upton:
The concept of Smart Cities has been around for a while and various governments
around the world have pumped money into their cities over an extended period of
time.
We now have the infrastructure in place, we have the price points and we have IoT becoming mainstream.
As usual, these things always take more time than you think,
and I do not believe today that we have a technology challenge on our hands. We
have much more of a business model challenge. Being able to deploy technology
to be able to bring benefits to citizens, I think that is finally getting to
the point where it is much better understood where innovation of the device
level, whether it's streetlights, whether it's the ability to measure water
quality, sound quality, humidity, all of these metrics that we have available
to us now. There has been very rapid innovation at that device level and at the
economics of how to produce them, at a price
that will enable widespread deployment.
All that has been happening
rapidly over the last few years getting us to the point
where we now have the infrastructure in place, we have the price points in
place, and we have IoT becoming mainstream enough that it is entering into the
manufacturing process of all sorts of different devices, as I said, ranging
from streetlights to personal security devices through to track and trace devices
that are built into the manufacturing process of goods.
That is now reaching mainstream and we are now able to take
advantage of this massive data that’s now being produced to be able to produce
even more efficient and smarter cities, and make them safer places for our
citizens.
Gardner:
Last word to you, Shridhar. If people wanted to learn more about the pilot
proof of concept (PoC) that you are doing there at Jamshedpur and other cities,
through the Smart Cities Mission, where might they go, are there any resources,
how would you provide more information to those interested in pursuing more of
these technologies?
Pilot projects take flight
Shridhar:
I would be very happy to help them look at the PoCs that we are doing. I would
classify the PoCs that we are doing is as far as safety is concerned, we talked
of energy management in one big bucket that is there, then the customer service
I spoke about, the fourth one I would say is more on the utility side. Gas and
water are two big applications where customers are looking at these PoCs very
seriously.
And there is very one interesting application in that one
customer wanted for pest control, where he wanted his mouse traps to have
sensors so that they will at any point of time know if there is a rat trap at
all, which I thought was a very interesting thing.
There are multiple streams that we have, we have done
multiple PoCs, we will be very happy as Tata Communications team [to provide
more information], and the HPE folks are in touch with us.
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You could write to us, to me in particular for some period
of time. We are also putting information on our website. We have marketing
collateral, which describes this. We will do some of the joint workshops with
HPE as well.
So there are multiple ways to reach us, and one of the best
ways obviously is through our website. We are always there to provide more
important help, and we believe that we can’t do it all alone; it’s about the
ecosystem getting to know and getting to work on it.
While we have partners like HPE on the platform level, we
also have partners such as Semtech, who
established Center of Excellence in Mumbai along with us. So the access to the
ecosystem from HPE side as well as our other partners is available, and we are
happy to work and co-create the solutions going forward.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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