CES 2019: Las Vegas and Los Angeles see 5G as a game changer for smart cities
The impact of 5G on smart cities technology will change the game, those in charge of the deployments across Los Angeles and Las Vegas said at CES 2019.
Speaking at a roundtable, AT&T VP of IoT and GM of Smart Cities Mike Zeto said smart cities deployments are already moving from the original focus on getting infrastructure deployed to now concentrating on more citizen-focused applications.
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"We really believe that 5G is fundamental for smart cities in the use cases that drive the value of the citizens, whether it be bridging the digital divide, providing infrastructure for businesses to expand, autonomous vehicles, public safety use cases, emergency preparedness," Zeto said.
"5G is really going to make a difference."
With 5G requiring more small cells, fibre, and towers, it is also important to have partnerships with cities to enable this deployment, Zeto said.
Two of these partnerships are seeing AT&T work with the cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas on solving specific use cases.
For instance, Las Vegas earlier this week announced that it will be trialling a smart lighting solution with AT&T and Ubicquia, aimed at improving public safety and energy efficiency.
The companies will test the solution for six months in parts of the Las Vegas Innovation District, using existing streetlights kitted out with Ubicquia's Ubicell streetlight routers. AT&T -- which faced criticism earlier this week after branding devices as being 5GE -- will then integrate its LTE and LTE-M networks with Ubicquia's smart lighting platform.
The Las Vegas journey towards a smart city began in March 2016, City of Las Vegas director of innovation and technology Michael Sherwood said, with the AT&T partnership for co-creation established very early on.
Sherwood said the goal of the technology is not just to have technology; it's to have the amenities to bring citizens, businesses, and visitors to Las Vegas.
"There's two things that we're looking at doing within our city: One's called situational awareness, it's providing real-time intelligence, real-time information to key stakeholders," Sherwood explained.
"The other component is force multiplication -- how can IoT technology provide or enhance labor resources we already have."
With the smart streetlights already deployed in the innovation district, Sherwood added that the city is currently working on expanding this in the next three to four months to other areas, and to additional capabilities such as air quality.
"You'll see a rapid expansion of some broad initiatives that cover public safety, sustainability, and environmental, as well as digital inequality," he added.
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ShakeAlertLA, an earthquake warning app launched last week by AT&T and the City of Los Angeles, also "puts value in the hands of citizens", Zeto said.
Jeff Gorell, Deputy Mayor of Public Safety for the City of Los Angeles, said the app began with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) working to build out a system with 250 sensors all over Southern California on fault lines. The organisation was underfunded, so Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti sought out local, state, and federal government funding as well as public-private partnerships to get the sensor system and app up and running before the next big earthquake could hit the area.
The process took a year and a half through development, testing, and launching, including finding the funding, Gorell said, with Los Angeles continuing to work with state and federal governments on smart cities advancements.
There is just 1.88 seconds between the sensors detecting an oncoming earthquake and the app pushing a notification to users, CIO for the City of Los Angeles Ted Ross said.
This provides enough time for risks to be mitigated during an earthquake, Ross explained, including for doctors to put a scalpel down, people to avoid entering elevators, and dangerous machinery to shut itself down.
"These aren't just cool, techy, kind of fun Black Mirror kinds of conversations; these are real conversations that launched [the app] last week," Ross said.
"When you fast forward a little bit ... adding 5G on top of that, now you have a game changer. So we're talking about making things 40 to 50 times faster, having that much less latency, which gives us the ability to deploy sensors and technologies to make ShakeAlertLA look like just a 1.0 type of conversation."
Ross conceded that smart cities is often used as a buzzword, but that what sets apart his city is the use of technology to "effectively change life for the better for its residents, its businesses, and its visitors".
"There's a lot of technology out there in the world, but I think what's really separated Los Angeles and Las Vegas and others -- the real smart cities are the ones that like to deploy technology to really move the needle, and I think that's a different aspect," Ross told ZDNet.
"It's data-driven, customer-focused."
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