Here Are Three New IoT Options for Cities to Get Smarter
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Verizon announced Intelligent Lighting, Video and Traffic Management solutions Tuesday.
Looking to ease municipalities into the Internet of Things era, Verizon on Wednesday announced the launch of three smart city solutions-as-a-service.
The smart city market is a major driver of IoT, expected to grow more than 20 percent by 2020, thanks to challenges like traffic congestion, aging infrastructure and resource management.
But cities struggle to integrate systems and scale their platforms, and their efforts are often far from frictionless and efficient.
“We really believe that the market is underserved today,” said Mike Lanman, Verizon senior vice president of enterprise and IoT products, during Wednesday’s unveiling. “If you look at cities, municipalities, they have a tremendous opportunity to cut costs and provide services to their citizens.”
Intelligent Lighting, the first new solution, relies on energy-efficient LEDs connected to a control system to regulate light levels remotely for safety; trigger alerts using light, moisture or sound sensors; and broadcast emergency notifications. Data and energy analytics are also offered.
The second solution, Intelligent Video, stores high-quality camera data on local devices and the cloud with edge analytics ready to spot atypical behavior and sound an alert. A video management system controls workflow and customers can pay for the bundle as they go.
And then there’s Intelligent Traffic Management with embedded sensors along roads to analyze speed, travel times, traffic, occupancy and even safety violations in near-real-time. Cities can use the data to manage traffic flow with adaptive signal control and mitigate congestion and pollution and improve fuel economy.
Verizon’s announcement came with the launch of a new IoT platform, ThingSpace, with a rich set of APIs to develop apps with and the ability to manage devices. Connectivity is provided via a wide area network (WAN) with a new Sequans chipset that reduces module cost.
Access charges will also go down with the launch of a new, scalable IoT core in the first quarter of 2016 for new use cases.
Verizon’s big data analytics engine will be commercialized for customers, so they can manage all the new data coming in.
“Smart cities are complex,” Lanman said. “They work best when their systems can coordinate and communicate with each other seamlessly.”
Dave Nyczepir is News Editor for Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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