Kathy Gibson reports from CeBIT, Hanover – Smart cities will increase the efficiency of government, offering a host of insights for city managers while services are delivered to citizens efficiently and in less time.
However, there are a number of challenges that are still stifling the take-off of smart city technologies and solutions, says Ryan Ding, executive director and head of products and services at Huawei.
It is forecast that there will be up to 100-billions connected devices by 2025.
“The boundaries of the physical and digital worlds are blurred,” says Ding. “Today, companies are looking to ICT to redefine their manufacturing and supply chain operations.
“ICT has evolved from the traditional supporting systems to production systems that drive transformation.”
Among the challenges preventing smart city from becoming a reality, Ding says, as a lack of visibility – images from CCTV cameras are not clear, and could be blurred, for instance if cars are moving fast.
There is also a huge amount of content, and it’s not always easy to find the relevant information, whether it’s in video or some other format.
Often, in an emergency, people battle to connect and are unable to contact emergency services. And, in the meantime, city administrators find it hard to keep all the systems under control, Ding says.
This can be difficult when events take place without warning. So unreliable transmission of inefficient supply can cause the power to fail unexpectedly; or manual meter reading can introduce errors into the system.
In addition, because production and financial systems are separated, so the transaction system is slow.
In the digital world, entertainment is undergoing massive changes as well, and nowadays people want information at their fingertips instantly.
But there are delays in broadcasting, where content is scattered in different systems, Ding points out. This can result in long latency, inconsistent experience and insufficient video, so using 4K HD and Fast acquisition is not always possible.
Financial services are an integral part of the digital society, and today customers simply expect to receive a secure and convenient service. However, as the number of device continue to explode, banking services are facing more sophisticated server attacks.
Meanwhile some processes still take time. For instance, it can take up to four weeks to process a credit check. And the systems are not able to precisely use location-based services.
“Innovative ICT technology is changing the industry by addressing these challenges,” Ding says. “New solutions like mobile broadband, SDN, cloud computing and big data are part of the answer.
For instance, Huawei’s mobile broadband systems makes Nairobi a smarter and safer city. The system provides convergent command of emergency services, intelligent analytics that make full use of video and panoramic surveillance. “Using this streamlined system can ensure faster response,” says Ding.
It has also had some success with SDN in the power industry, helping to make the COPEL smart grid more robust. The network has gone from 2 000 minutes per year of downtime to just three minutes.
Phoenix TV uses Omnimedia to broadcast news around the world, within five minutes of its collection. The company has made a smooth transition to 4K and will go with 8K in the future.
In the financial services space, big data has helped CMB cut credit check time from three weeks to just 10 minutes, while ICBS can securely support 380-trillion online transactions per year.
Huawei has launched four new products addressing four different industry verticals: eLTE broadband trunking for smart cities; Agile WAN for the smart grid; OceanStor 9000 for 4K; and a next-generation DDOS solution for the financial services vertical computing.
eLTE Broadband Trunking Solution
The Huawei eLTE Broadband Trunking Solution is based on 4G technology. It supports voice trunking, data, and video in one network, which enables dispatching visualization.
To satisfy the vertical industry requirements, the Huawei eLTE Broadband Trunking Solution supports more frequency bands, offers greater flexibility in networking, and provides a number of terminal choices.
Aside from the common frequencies of 400MHz, 800MHz, 1.4GHz, 1.8GHz and 2.3GHz, the solution also supports broadband trunking communications in the 3.5GHz frequency.
In addition to EP820 Broadband Trunking Handset and the EM720 Industrial-Grade Mobile Hotspot, Huawei is also collaborating with partners to develop more devices to address industry-specific needs.
The solution supports connections to intelligent video systems, Telepresence, IP call centers and third-party applications, which helps to improve the efficiency of inter-department collaboration and emergency response of governments overall.
Agile WAN 3.0
As the bridge connecting the world, Wide Area Networks are gradually becoming bottlenecks for enterprises that are trying to provide good end-user experience, and improving WAN capabilities is a current trend.
The Huawei Agile WAN Solution, through integrating WAN SDN, Internet protocol (IP) hard-pipe technology, atom routers, high throughput, eSight mobile and other leading technologies, helps enterprises stay competitive by providing reliable network connections to ensure a high quality experience.
OceanStor 9000
With the rise of 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) era, Huawei launched its OceanStor 9000 – the world’s fastest storage system with large-scale horizontal scalability – to meet the growing needs of the media industry.
With its eTurbo communications protocol, OceanStor 9000 is the first network attached storage (NAS) system that addresses production and editing requirements with six-layer 4K UHD programs.
With a high-density and energy-saving system design, OceanStor 9000 enables media organizations to save operating costs by reducing machine room space by 200% and energy consumption by 32%. It also helps improve overall efficiency by enabling the management of the entire program production including reporting, editing, broadcasting, managing and storing, in a single storage system.
Next Generation Anti-DDoS
Huawei’s Next Generation Anti-DDoS Solution uses big data technology to build traffic models in over 60 dimensions to prevent hundreds of DDoS attacks without unintentionally interrupting legitimate requests.
Huawei’s powerful and most current IP reputation technologies can accurately identify zombie hosts while improving the Internet access experience of legitimate users.