Recommendations for operators to address the Smart Cities market

IHS has three key recommendations for operators as they develop their strategies to address the smart cities market:

Partner to reduce risks: Operators should partner with application developers and others in the value chain to reduce their risk, level of investment, and time to market. The smart cities market is still fragmented and use cases and market requirements are still evolving. Operators will still be able to capture a substantial share of revenue in the value chain beyond managed connectivity by developing horizontal, generic value-added service capabilities and components that can be configured and applied in a modular fashion for specific smart city engagements. In particular, municipal government-driven initiatives are likely to require a high degree of customization and may require the operator to partner and share revenue with local businesses in any case, as part of the city’s economic development scheme.

Utilize multiple connectivity technologies: The smart city deployments are making use of multiple types of connectivity technologies. Operators will be best positioned if they have the capability to offer services using multiple technologies. In particular, IHS believes that LPWAN will play an increasingly important role in the smart cities market. There are a number of LPWAN technologies using unlicensed spectrum in the market at present, with SIGFOX and LoRaWAN achieving an especially high profile. In addition, the mobile industry’s 3GPP standards body is working to develop a 3GPP narrowband standard that will be compatible with existing LTE infrastructure. This standard, known as NB-IoT (Narrow Band - Internet of Things), should be finalized with Release 13 in March 2016 and available commercially in the first quarter of 2017. 

Broaden focus beyond M2M-type use cases:  It is important for operators to keep in mind that smart cities will involve a range of data sources, in particular current government databases and crowd-sourced social media feeds. Operators tend to place their smart cities programs within their M2M/IoT business units, but will need to develop a holistic approach that incorporates these other types of data sources into deployments. In addition, smart city projects will often require the ability to share data with multiple third-party stakeholders. Consequently, IHS recommends that operators develop a plan to enable multi-party data aggregation and distribution, whether through open application programming interfaces (APIs) or open service layer standards, such as FIWARE and OneM2M.

Source:IHS