In our previous article, Smart Cities: How SDN and NFV are Changing the Way We Live we discussed how SDN, NFV, IoT and Cloud tech are impacting day-to-day city life. With the ability to increase communication through the redirecting of compute resources in times of need, SDN, NFV, IoT and Cloud are making it possible for cities to react and build smarter internal infrastructures.
While talking about the benefits of smart city infrastructure is one thing, actually accomplishing it is something else entirely. Not only does the implementation of smart city infrastructure take a ton of money – forward building matched with retrofitting – it also takes proper management and implementation across multiple vital city arteries.
Here’s how smart cities can come online.
Avenues for Smart Cities
At the current time, there are four major models for a city to become a smart city. They are:
- Build Own Operate: Build Own Operate, shortened to BOO, is the process of building smart city infrastructure wherein the municipality owns, controls, manages and wholly builds all needed infrastructure. Once infrastructure is in place, the municipality owns, manages and operates their smart city solutions. Furthermore, under the BOO smart city model, operations and upkeep of all needed tech – NFV, SDN, IoT and Cloud – fall under the control of the municipal planner and/or mayor/appointed governing body.
- Build, Operate, Transfer: Build, Operate, Transfer, shortened to BOT, is the process of building a smart city infrastructure wherein the municipality hires a private company to build all needed infrastructure and to run city wide smart networks until the municipality can take it over/manage city wide smart services on their own. Typically, in the BOT model of smart city planning, the outsourcing of infrastructure building is spearheaded by the city planner or appointed governing body. Just as with BOO, once operations and maintenance are turned over to the municipality, control of the smart solutions are managed by the city planner and/or mayor/appointed governing body.
- Open Business Model: Open Business Model, shortened to OBM, is the process of building a smart city infrastructure wherein the municipality is open to any and all third parties to build, maintain and carry out smart city solutions so long as the third party in question can abide by the regulations and laws set forth by said municipality. Unlike both BOT and BOO, in the OBM model of smart city planning, at no point in time does the municipality take over management of smart solutions like SDN, NFV, IoT or Cloud. At most, cities entering into an open business model stand only to regulate the terms of smart city planning via municipality legislation.
- Build, Operate Manage: Build Operate Manage, shortened to BOM, is closer to the OBM of smart city planning with the key differentiation of full municipality hands off. In the BOM model of smart city planning, the municipality through their city planner awards a contract to a private company to build, maintain and provide smart city services to their community. In this agreement, the municipality field’s bids from private contractors to build, maintain and provide smart city solutions. Once building is complete, the municipality treats smart city services like any other monthly service to be paid as a monthly bill.
In all cases, BOO, BOT, OBM and BOM, the city passes the cost of smart city living off to residents thus, contracts awarded for smart city planning are based on yearly budgets and levied taxes on the community.
Smart City Planning – Legislation and Democracy in Action
For anyone who has ever attended a city council meeting or for anyone who has ever sat on a local Atlanta municipality governing body, you understand the choices you make, i.e. the laws you vote into action, have consequences because they impact people. Be it a law about water use in the summer time or a law about parking enforcement on Tuesday mornings, the laws created by a local municipality matter for the people living under them.
This is where democracy comes into play. In any town, a proposed law about changing something as small as a left turn on a major municipal street can cause residents to come out in force for a wide variety of reasons. Before legislation passes, as legislation passes and after legislation passes, residents will voice concerns, stir it up and possibly vote out members of the elected council.
This being the case, the idea of smart city planning, as much as it costs (we will get to that in a bit), is first and foremost an issue of democracy in action. If parking legislation brings out residents in force, what do think happens when a city proposed smart city services that include sensors, monitors and cameras all running 24/7/365 collecting data on day-to-day life in that town?
For the techies, smart cities are comprised of Software Defined Networks, the Internet of Things devices, Network Functions Virtualization and Cloud infrastructures but we would be remiss to think of smart city planning as only comprised of the aforementioned technologies. In truth, the fifth element – the human element – needs to be taken into consideration.
This leads us to an interesting point – for the BOO, BOT and OBM model of smart city planning, the city either has control of the building and operations or the day to day operations via hands on management or legislation. The fourth option though, the one which most cities will most likely choose, BOM, asks a city to hand off building and control to a private party operating outside local legislation. This point is worrisome for a multitude of issues.
For this reason, before a municipality invests in smart city planning, it needs to think of more than SDN, NFV, IoT and Cloud. It needs to think of the human consequence of those applied technologies.
The Cost of Smart City Planning
Now, before we get into this, we have to state a few key issues for sake of clarity:
- The cost of smart city planning will be based on the size and population of a given municipality.
- The cost of smart city planning, to be considered beneficial, must be justified through local tax levying based on per capita income of municipal residents.
- The cost of smart city planning, to be considered a long term success, must be weighed against the monthly cost of city operations without smart infrastructures
To the first point, smart city planning based on the size and population of a given municipality, it would stand to reason that NFV solutions will scale as population grows and shrinks overtime. As most cities stay within a few percentage points, growth or decay, over a ten year period, the cost of smart city planning should be based on median population over a decade period of time.
To the second point, the cost of smart city planning needs to be approved or denied by voters based on per capita income. Take for example of the proposed Indian smart city of Gift. Under the leadership of current Prime Minister Modi, the proposed smart city would cost $23,500 per person, if and only if, a minimum of 100,000 people lived in the city. Note, and here is the critical point, $23,500 per person in a nation with a per capita income of nearly just $1,000.
To the third point, one of the most basic utilizations for SDN, NFV, IoT and Cloud is to cut down on operational cost of technologies through the analyzation of day-to-day tasks. For this reason, when looking into smart city infrastructure, city councils need to look at the overall savings of implementing smart services when applied to basic daily solutions like energy. If the city can cut down daily energy cost enough on a daily basis to justify annual savings, smart planning should prove a good idea yet, if it can’t, caution should be waved.
Every aspect of the aforementioned must be taken into account when a municipality considers smart city solutions. While we normally think of smart city planning in terms of the technology which helps to power it, we have to take a step back to see the overall picture impacting the human element of that proposed smart infrastructure.