Comment on ”Market Insight: How Should CSPs Exploit the Opportunity of Smart City Streetlight Projects?”

As Gartner wrote  ‘The right vendor, one who can cover at least several of the bases enumerated above, will knit a series of discrete initiatives into a dynamic and successful system’. We believe it is imperative to offer a platform that will keep options open for the future by supporting many different networks and data sources. The ability to easily accept data simultaneously from multiple IoT sensors using different communication means is not trivial but represents a critical feature to make a solution future proof, more specifically this should not require coding expertise or reverting to the software vendor every time the end user wants to add a new device to his system.

The future Smart City ecosystems – even the current ones – will be composed of many different infrastructures : one or many suppliers for smart street lights controllers, each using proprietary hardware, firmware and protocol, a different one for trash sensors, for sewer level sensors, for parking stall occupancy, for air quality, etc. This allows end users to keep their options open and select the best products to meet their needs and not get cornered with a single vendor with no alternative.

There exists multiple communication options for IoT devices (LoRa, NB-IoT, LTE-M, Sigfox, Digimesh, Wirepas, BLE, WIFI, wired, etc.) and others such as 5G will be new options in the short future, each with its own purpose, use, and advantages/disadvantages. The exploitation cost of some of those technologies and their expected longevity and availability simply render them unusable for certain applications, on the other hand the low bandwidth and higher latency of others is not efficient for other applications. The platform should also allow interfacing at higher levels via APIs to more complex systems in ordre to exchange data from and toward each system.