Ericsson Demo at the Philippine Telecoms Summit 2017

Ericsson believes that connectivity can make positive socio-economic and environmental impacts around the world.

The technology challenges Ericsson Research have been focusing on in the last few years are:

-          data analytics in operation support systems

-          intelligent decision support

-        mission-critical cloud and the internet of things in the context of network operation centers

THE CONNECTED MEGA-CITY

An important aspect of Ericsson's research is looking into what these new technologies mean for people and societies, hence The Connected Megacity.

 

Overview: (material from Ericsson)

"Today, we see a transformation in the way people live and congregate around the world; more and more people are becoming city dwellers and projections indicate that from 50% today, they will be 70% by 2050. A considerable share of the population will mostly form part of very large urban areas - the so-called mega cities.

ICT solutions and the Networked Society are important components when finding holistic and balanced views to city life management. There is a need for new urban models to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges in sustainable ways.

In all this, we, the citizens are central, and not only because it is our quality of life that is hanging in the balance but also because we can contribute with information and innovation as well as help support the city by changing/adapting our behavior.

With focus on technology enablers, hereby gives a glimpse of the Connected Megacity, by going through three city scenarios, namely the Safe City, the Creative City and the Greener City.

The Resilient/Safe City. One important aspect of such a city is its ability to respond to an unexpected event in a resilient way. Road accidents for instance, unfortunately can and will happen despite everybody’s best intentions. What’s important, apart from minimal casualties, is their impact on the city operations and its citizens and how quickly the latter can return to normal operations. From a technical point of view, we believe that through analyzing and combining data feeds and situational knowledge, patterns of behavior can be identified. These can then be encapsulated together with expert knowledge to lead to informed actions and intelligent recommendations. This way, available resources (public services, people, sensors, devices, etc.) can be used in an effective way to understand and mitigate the situation; something that requires interoperability and cross-domain communication.

The Creative/Proactive City scenario highlights how the connected city can learn from previous experiences and take proactive measures before an event. This is of course done through a combination of technical enablers, but also with the support of the citizens through various incentives and mechanisms for raising their awareness. If, for example a rock concert or another major event is scheduled to happen in the coming days, city operations can be based on analyses of previous similar events It may be decided to increase the public transportation, allocate more police resources and give people motivation to behave in ways that enable the event to flow more smoothly. City operations can also increase the network capacity around the event arena, give people recommendations to offers and promotions or increase their physical event experience through digital services in different ways.

The Greener City, which we find it to be one step closer to the vision of sustainable cities, illustrates how energy use and load can be predicted, for example, based on weather forecasts. This enables the city, its citizens and industries to adapt their behavior and reschedule production and consumption to avoid serious power shortages. 

The smart grid is one domain where the Internet of Things is gaining momentum and the use of wireless technologies is well suited to providing last-mile connectivity to grid devices. The capabilities of LTE, such as very low latency, Quality-of-Service and high throughput wrapped in a future-proof global standard, are opening up new areas for applications in mission critical M2M communications. However, M2M traffic characteristics differ greatly from smart phone traffic. Therefore, it is important to understand how to take advantage of the advanced features of LTE in order to optimize the network for specific applications like the smart grid.

By means of these three scenarios, Ericsson hopes to have exemplified how megacities can respond to some of the events as they occur and prepare for future scenarios, while taking into account the relationships between diverse stakeholders. All linked with how these responses can be aligned with a more sustainable development."

*Blogger's note: The Philippine Telecoms Summit 2017 targeted solutions that we need for a better future. The Ericsson demo shows that that a well planned city can surely help us proper, and it is a must to take a closer look about how our cities develop, not just for telecommunications, but for all needs, such as road, facilities, and more. As we look forward to a bright future, we should take action, and plan properly.