Metropolitan scale deployments
There are several planned or ongoing large-scale deployments of the IoT,
to enable better management of cities and systems. For example, Songdo,
South Korea, the first of its kind fully equipped and wired smart city,
is gradually being built, with approximately 70 percent of the business
district completed as of June 2018. Much of the city is planned to be
wired and automated, with little or no human intervention.
Another application is a currently undergoing project in Santander,
Spain. For this deployment, two approaches have been adopted. This city
of 180,000 inhabitants has already seen 18,000 downloads of its city
smartphone app. The app is connected to 10,000 sensors that enable
services like parking search, environmental monitoring, digital city
agenda, and more. City context information is used in this deployment so
as to benefit merchants through a spark deals mechanism based on city
behavior that aims at maximizing the impact of each notification.
Other examples of large-scale deployments underway include the
Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City; work on improving air and water
quality, reducing noise pollution, and increasing transportation
efficiency in San Jose, California; and smart traffic management in
western Singapore. French company, Sigfox, commenced building an
ultra-narrowband wireless data network in the San Francisco Bay Area in
2014, the first business to achieve such a deployment in the U.S. It
subsequently announced it would set up a total of 4000 base stations to
cover a total of 30 cities in the U.S. by the end of 2016, making it the
largest IoT network coverage provider in the country thus far.
Another example of a large deployment is the one completed by New York
Waterways in New York City to connect all the city’s vessels and be able
to monitor them live 24/7. The network was designed and engineered by
Fluidmesh Networks, a Chicago-based company developing wireless networks
for critical applications. The NYWW network is currently providing
coverage on the Hudson River, East River, and Upper New York Bay. With
the wireless network in place, NY Waterway is able to take control of
its fleet and passengers in a way that was not previously possible. New
applications can include security, energy and fleet management, digital
signage, public Wi-Fi, paperless ticketing and others.