5G and IoT: Fueling Smart Cities

Today’s modern cities are on the verge of major change. By 2030, these smart cities are projected to have a market value of nearly $7 billion, with urban populations expected to grow to an estimated 6.4 billion by 2050. This growth can be attributed to population migration and the dynamic and rapid changes in technology, including advancement to 5G, improvements for the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies with artificial intelligence, the move to cloud technologies, and the driving force of digital transformation.  

Mobile Technologies at the Heart of the Smart City

With more and more citizens moving to urban areas, the digital experience will be at the heart of a more livable future. To fulfill this promise, smart cities will have to deliver superior quality of service and experiences. This will require that 5G/IoT and cloud technologies be put in place to support the growth and maintenance of connected city networks and infrastructure.

Advanced smartphones, with integrated sensors, will make it easier for citizens to not only use relevant mobile applications for managing personal services but to do so while on the move. For example, citizens will be able to enjoy the convenience of getting notification alerts on traffic density to guide travel routes, local news headlines, smart parking availability, medication pickup, and other personal care needs.

5G Deployment Opens the Door to More Sophisticated IoT Innovation

The advancement of 5G networks provides the opportunity for more sophisticated features in IoT for connected devices. IoT-connected devices are projected to grow in number by 18 percent to 14.4 billion in 2022 alone. However, the deployment of 5G also introduces complexities into the network ecosystem for all stakeholders—from enterprises to communications service providers, hyperscalers, and network equipment vendors. 

These businesses face the daunting prospect of interoperability issues related to multi-cloud deployments, multivendor systems, open platforms, cloud-native services, network slicing, and multi-edge domains.

Monitoring Connectivity Will Be Key to Smart City Success

5G/IoT will play an increasingly important role in ensuring the digital growth of smart cities, relying on a wide ecosystem of connected networks and emerging technologies. This makes it imperative that city leaders work with technology partners to proactively resolve any challenges concerning emerging 5G/IoT use cases in terms of technology, infrastructure, and vendor partnership demands. 

• Technology: Smart cities will offer advanced services such as smart parking and environmental systems, as well as interactive kiosks providing mass transit and visitor information. Such connective services will require optimum performance of city networks. Insights on usage and performance will be required to maintain and expand these services. 
• Infrastructure: Smart cities will rely on infrastructure to deliver smart applications. These applications will be instrumental for improving public services with goals such as reducing traffic fatalities, accelerating emergency response times, shaving the average commute times, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions—to name just a few. City planners will need to leverage data from real-time experiences, which will provide actionable insights for prioritizing critical infrastructure and economic initiatives.
• Vendors/partnerships: Smart cities will be well-advised to rely on vendor-agnostic systems when adopting next-generation application, network, and data solutions to enhance business operations and service delivery. Such systems will be key to verifying that outcomes are accurate and timely when it comes to services delivered by vendors and partners. 

To achieve optimum results with 5G/IoT, smart cities will need to have monitoring and smart data collection on connected devices and sensors, scalable and open data platforms, broadband, and wireless services to ensure optimum performance and to realize the benefits of real-time insights.

Visibility Without Borders

NETSCOUT's scalable Visibility Without Borders monitoring solution, which is designed for complex environments such as 5G/IoT/multicloud, can enable smart cities to gain actionable insights into network and application performance and service quality. Relying on NETSCOUT’s Smart Data is the best way to achieve consistent views of the network infrastructure, applications, and services—including all dependencies—in an open architecture with an end-through-end view of all components in both physical and virtual multigenerational networks. The resulting visibility this Smart Data delivers is the secret to making informed decisions that will be both intelligent and affordable in assuring service quality and performance for connected city networks and applications.

Learn more about 5G network monitoring solutions.