The Most Common Challenges Facing Smartcities

When it comes to a popular city's physical infrastructure — beautiful parks, well-designed public spaces, residential neighborhoods, museums, and a central financial district — its value to citizens is not fully realized without proper roads and public transportation systems

Fremont, CA: Many cities today aspire to be the smart cities in future. However, in order to do so, they must overcome the challenges associated with developing a complex strategy involving public and private participants, integrators, direct and indirect stakeholders, network and managed service providers, product vendors, and IT infrastructure providers.

There are, nevertheless, challenges that can be addressed today through a combination of technological innovation and collaboration between public and private organizations.

Infrastructure Must be a Core Element

The fundamental elements of a smart city are currently stitched together by various stakeholders, vendors, and technologies, resulting in a fragmented ecosystem. This environment will be unable to meet the initiative's demands, support new technologies, or effectively align with planned municipal services or construction efforts as the initiative grows in size.

When it comes to a popular city's physical infrastructure — beautiful parks, well-designed public spaces, residential neighborhoods, museums, and a central financial district — its value to citizens is not fully realized without proper roads and public transportation systems. And as that city expands, it will struggle to keep up with traffic and will be unable to meet the needs of its citizens.

The reality is that most cities capable of launching large-scale smart city initiatives do not have the physical infrastructure to support them without significant changes to the existing components, which not only raises costs but also disrupts residents' lives.

In this sense, IT infrastructure is equally important for a smart city initiative to support the demands of multiple solutions from technology and application providers, systems integrators, and infrastructure service providers and operators, along with a common network provided through adherence to industry-proven open standards.

Smart City IT Infrastructure Must be Agile and Flexible to Scale

Infrastructure that is not scalable will become obsolete as smart city capabilities evolve. While modular components are essential building blocks for smart cities, the amount of data used to power these modular components must be scalable as the amount of data produced grows.

For example, as cities continue to connect bus routes, ride-sharing apps, and gridlock patterns with transportation infrastructure such as data usage, traffic lights will skyrocket. The real benefits of a connected, smart city cannot be realized unless the data collected from each of these devices can be scaled and connected.