Image source: Cisco
The experience of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) is showing the importance of a robust platform for supporting the development of smart cities, delegates at a UKAuthority conference have been told.
The perspective came from Stu Higgins, head of smart cities and internet of things (IoT) at networking technology provider Cisco, at the Smart Places and Connected Communities online event.
In October of last year the company was appointed as the GMCA’s partner in the development of the GM One network, a public sector digital infrastructure for the city-region.
Higgins said this is providing an element of a broader platform that in turn provides a foundation for the deployment of new technologies.
“It’s a platform approach that enables them to deliver on their strategy for a greener, fairer, more prosperous city-region,” he told the conference.
“The brilliant thing for everybody involved in smart cities is that it’s not just a trial. It’s at scale, it’s for real and it’s across a 10-year period, supporting an area of 2.8 million people with a lot of technology that enables individual organisations to develop really cool things to provide those outcomes.”
Layers and network
He conveyed the platform as consisting of orchestration and application layers, along with a centralised infrastructure and software defined network fabric. These can be connected to 5G and other types of network and street layer IoT technologies to provide a wide range of citizen services.
“If you get this stuff right – which is how they’re doing things in Greater Manchester – you can use this platform for lots of different use cases,” he said.
“There is also a phase which is securely connecting things. You start by connecting things together, and once you get that right it means you can use that same technology platform approach across different use cases.”
Higgins also emphasised the importance of thinking initially about outcomes for the public in planning the deployment of technologies, the need for ubiquitous connectivity across urban and rural areas, and to keep the need to move data around to the forefront of planning.
“There’s been a promise of smart cities for some time,” he said. “It’s only really now that the demand, desire, technology and direction of the public sector have caught up to deliver these things at scale.”
