Notes about „smart city“
The Mayors of three German cities signed a cooperation with Huawei at the CeBIT Fair. I was an observer of the signing ceremony.
The cities are located near the biggest German airport of Frankfurt in the economically active Rhein-Main region. However, the cities have combined less inhabitants than Huawei has employees.
What is the agreement about? The cities wish to receive Smart City services, and Huawei plans to open a Smart City Exhibition Center.
What are these smart services exactly? The speech of the mayors were quite generic. If you read the press release, you find only one specific project: the construction of a high speed fibre-optical network.
The cities probably have more projects in mind, as they have organized a German-Chinese Smart City forum in Rüsselsheim in September 2014.
Huawei itself defines the key aspects of Smart City on its website as follows:
In a nutshell, a Smart City describes the integrated management of information that creates value by applying advanced technologies to search, access, transfer, and process information
If I simplify this sentence, Smart City is information management. Like a database.
Huawei further lists the following application areas (in this order):
- Government and administration (e-government)
- Traffic management (e-traffic)
- CCTV (Video surveillance)
- Health and education (e-health and e-education)
- Home Monitoring (e-Home)
Next these technical requirements are listed:
A Smart City needs to support services like E1, E3, DS3, STM-1, PRI, ATM, FR and X.25
Overall, Huawei offers a very technical interpretation of the concept Smart City. This is of course not so surprising, as they want to sell the needed technologies. Compare this to other interpretations in my article “Smart City, one term, many concepts“