Smart cities are an idea that generates lots of excitement, perhaps in part because everyone has their own view of what the term means. I’ve been surprised to find that many of the technologists I’ve talked with see a smart city as one where practically everything is measured or viewed by a sensor open on the Internet. This contrasts with the view of most of the experts I know, who think that vision has zero chance of success. Everyone does agree that we have to step beyond the usual overpromotion; this is about “smart” cities not “hype” cities, after all.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse on the open-Internet approach, but it is important to understand what’s behind it. This camp sees IoT as a kind of successor to the Internet. We had open connectivity and hosting with the Internet. It spawned a whole industry of what we’d call “over-the-top” applications and players, in no small part because the open connectivity eliminated what would otherwise have been a big barrier to market entry. The same, say the open-Interneters, could happen with IoT. Simple.
The contrary view is pretty simple too. The investment needed to create the initial “open Internet” had already been made by telcos and cable companies. With IoT, the sensors are not out there to exploit, they’d have to be deployed and connected at considerable cost. Who would invest to create an open sensor community, the contrarians ask? Then there’s the issue of security and privacy. How would you ensure that sensors weren’t hacked, and that people didn’t abuse them by (for example) tracking/stalking others?
You can see arguments for both sides here, but suppose we could figure out a way of uniting the positions. Could a smart-city architecture provide financial sensibility, security, and privacy and at the same time create an open community whose attempts to build their own value would end up building value for all? It might be possible.
The first thing we’d need is a solution to the “first telephone” problem, the old saw that says that nobody will buy the first telephone because they’d have nobody to call. A smart city needs smarts, and needs them fast, or there’s no credibility to participation. That’s one reason why the problem of getting an ROI on “open sensors” is so critical.
There’s a possible solution. We have literally billions of sensors out there today. Most proposed smart cities are already made up of buildings and homes that have some smarts. Most of those have private sensor and controller devices installed, accessible remotely via the Internet. However, most of the information those sensors collect are truly private to the facility owner, tenants, or both. What’s needed, first and foremost, in any smart city strategy is cooperation from current sensor owners. That means identifying information that could be shared without risking privacy, and identifying an architecture for collecting and sharing it.
Suppose you have one of those fancy Internet home thermostats. You set a temperature using your phone and the heat or air conditioning work to match what you want. Obviously, you don’t want anonymous third parties setting your heat and air, but there are some things you might be willing to accept.
Example: Suppose your power/gas company would give you a rate adjustment if they had the right to change your thermostat setting during an emergency. Many users would accept the idea, as long as they could agree on just how much they’d get and how much of a change the utility was allowed to make. Example: Suppose your heating is set at 72 degrees, but your thermostat reading says the temperature in the home has increased from 72 to 85 in just ten minutes. Could there be a fire or a major malfunction? Would you be willing to allow that condition to be reported to you, or to a security company? Example: Would you allow the video feed from your video doorbell or security cameras to be made available to public safety personnel or security contractors under controlled conditions? Example: Suppose that every video doorbell and Internet thermostat in a given area suddenly dropped contact. Could that be an indication of a power problem?
The point here is that the right way to start a smart city initiative is to identify things that IoT would be able to do based on what’s already deployed in facilities. While an individual city could define a specification for how a home/building security or facility control system would expose this information, a better approach would be for a standards body to define both a collection mechanism that home systems or their vendors could elect to install, and a distribution system to control how that information can be shared. Cities could then adopt the standards, provide incentives to expose the information, even require some classes of facilities to share information.
The obvious next step in this process would be to create a “trusted agent”. Smart thermostats and security systems often store information in the cloud and work in a kind of three-way relationship between the device, the device vendor, and the device owner. We can envision smart-city IoT starting with a series of services, represented by APIs and hosted by a trusted entity, that would “publish” sensor information in a variety of forms.
The obvious question is who will provide these services. This is what network operators should be looking at in the IoT space, not promoting a host of 5G-attached sensors. The latter space would almost surely require the operators to invest in the sensors themselves, which of course kills the revenue associated with the deployment. It would also surely result in legal/regulatory action to open the sensors to all, which would make the whole deployment a big money pit. The former would be an opportunity for operators to get into a high-level service space before the OTTs did.
All of the major public cloud providers (Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle) could reasonably decide to get into this business too. IoT-related services would not only provide an early lead in the realistic IoT deployment model, it would buff up the providers’ credentials in the enterprise hybrid cloud space. Apple, who is clearly trying to find a revenue secret that doesn’t boil down to “Yuppies buy more iPhones”, could get smart and make a bet in the space. IBM might be the most obvious player to move here, given that it’s been a player (or at least prospective player) in the smart cities space for some time.
The big lessons to be learned here are first that we’re not going to get to smart cities because cities or others bite the bullet and pay big bucks to deploy a bunch of open sensors, and second that the path to a smart city is by expanding from a smart-building base. Once those points are accepted, I think it’s fairly easy to plot a rational path forward, which I’ve tried to do here. If they’re not accepted, then we have IoT problems to face down the road.