Smart cities — coming soon to a place near you

From my story in the New Zealand Herald:

Smart cities are where digital technologies are used to create better places to live and work.

Sensors, intelligent networks and applications combine to connect, monitor and analyse information in order to make the city work more efficiently. This can mean making transport run smoother; providing cleaner, more efficient energy, making people safer and delivering essential government services such as health and education more effectively.

At the last count there were 288 smart city projects around the world including Seoul, Glasgow and Barcelona.

Infrastructure report: The fibre route to smart cities – Business – NZ Herald News.

In the interview Chorus network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers said rolling out fibre to 33 towns around New Zealand gives us a great jumping off point for creating smart cities.

Smart cities drive fibre interest

Chorus sees smart cities as a way to whip up more interest in fibre networks. That’s clever, not everyone wants to stream six channels of HD TV at a time or get super-fast ping times while playing the latest Xbox titles. Although that does seem to be the main driver for home users installing fibre.

While there is an entertaining side to ultrafast broadband, streaming television does not justify the government spending $1.5 billion of tax payer money. On the other hand creating jobs, revitalising run-down towns and generally improving the quality of life will broaden the technology’s appeal.

For me, Rodgers’ most interesting comments were about the bottom-up effect of Chorus’s Gigatown promotion which has ordinary people contributing ideas on how their communities can benefit from fibre.