Smart Cities, Townships : What could be your share?

Smart Cities is a collective term for digitization of cities to make them live-able, sustainable and more socially equitable. Typical solutions are in the areas of traffic, public transport, water, solid waste, energy, health care, citizen security etc to make the service delivery efficient and also to add convenience to the citizens.

Smart Townships is a collective term for digitization of air/sea ports, large living/work places and commercial buildings to make them more Convenient Comfortable, Secure for the benefits of tenants and Sustainable and Efficient for the benefit of owners and investors..

Solutions components and their share: Smart City/ Township solutions are mega IoT solutions with sensors/cameras in the field for monitoring, Network switch/Gateways send the data through wireless/fiber connectivity to the data center, where the applications are hosted to provide the targeted functionality/experience to the operations and also to the end users. Broad categories and their typical share in the solutions will be as follows. 

1.    Sensors, Cameras (15%) – Occupancy, Environment sensors, Video cameras.

2.    Network switch, IoT Gateways (5%) - To aggregate the sensor/camera data and send it to the data center

3.    Information displays, Communication devices (10%) – Digital messaging boards, and Audio announcement systems for public communication.

4.    Edge computing devices (5%) – Edge computers in the field with typical processing power of desktop/laptop computers.

5.    Network connectivity (10%) – Optical Fiber, WLAN, WiFi, Cellular, P2P wireless connectivity from Network switches/IoT gateways to the Data center.

6.    Power supplies (5%) – DC-DC power supplies with Lithium batteries to support 2-4 hours of power back up. 

7.    Passive infrastructure, Installation (10%) - Civil works, Mounting structures, Mounting, Cabling, Installation.

8.    Application software, Analytics (15%) – Applications for providing the targeted functionality/user experience, Data/Video analytics.

9.    Data center, ICCC, Operations (25%) – On prem/cloud compute/storage, Laser/projection video walls, Software, Monitoring and operations.

If you are a solution provider and have more items of your own, you will have a bigger share of the solutions. For example, for a traffic violation detection solution, the software only provider will have 15% share including video analytics. If you have your own edge computing devices too, another 5% adds to it but if you are sourcing and supplying it, you will only have the trading margin for that item.

The Risk and the opportunity: The Smart City/Township solutions are some of the best use cases of IoT solutions and growth areas of future and hence many organisations are keen on taking it up though they may have only few items to build, supply or deploy for them. The solutions are capital intensive, to be deployed in public places and also to be operated and maintained for a minimum period of 5-8 years.  Beyond the complexity and scale, the reliability and data security aspects of the solutions also will pose challenges to implement as well as operate them efficiently and effectively.

It is important the organizations, leverage their assets/strengths, have a clear strategy to acquire/leave the rest form the complete solution/business perspective, internalize it with their management and investors as the value add and business share could be relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

Your thoughts and comments are most welcome!

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