The winners of this year’s Digital Cities Survey from the Center for Digital Government are those making smart investments in technologies from infrastructure and citizen engagement to data storage and cybersecurity.
The Smart City multi-trillion-dollar market has become an umbrella for a lot of smarts – Smart: Healthcare, Building, Industry, Logistics, Transportation, Agriculture, IoT, and more. Each one of those smarts have a gazillion applications and products that support them. But we need a better way to define the market that will allow us to talk more specifically about the needs and discern appropriate solutions quicker. A decoder ring, if you will.
It’s happening again; this time, we’re obsessing over all things “smart.” At first, there were just smartphones. Then came smart watches, smart homes, smart grids, smart switches and smart cities. At some point, the term “smart” became diluted as marketers started applying it to more and more solutions. It’s time to stop and ask: What do we really mean by “smart”? Hidden in that definition is the need for connectivity and the ability to inform the user in order to guide decisions.
Latency times associated with existing infrastructure is approximately 100 milliseconds. Some services, such as online HD video streaming, need latency reduced by up to three-times to be properly functional. This issue can be mitigated by locating the physical infrastructure closer to the source data and in turn providing higher bandwidth: Edge computing.
Data center operators and facility managers continuously work to ensure temperatures remain consistent without raising energy bills. With so many options on the market, it can be hard to decide which one is the best. Beating data center heat is possible, though, and here are four ways to do it: Employ regularly scheduled maintenance, optimize server racks for cooling efficiency, rethink your data center architecture, and increase data center temperatures.
Everstream is building an enterprise grade fiber network to support Milwaukee and its businesses as they scale and grow in the coming years. The build-out also includes the construction of new small cell sites to provide high-bandwidth connectivity to the city and businesses. This will deliver the increased bandwidth and data required to support the upcoming 2020 Democratic National Convention (DNC).
As the industry adopts the latest generation of PoE technology for managing data and power over a single Ethernet cable, users face the challenge of making pre-standard powered devices (PDs) work alongside new IEEE 802.3bt-2018-compliant PDs in an existing Ethernet infrastructure. Microchip Technology Inc. has eased the transition with IEEE 802.3bt-2018-compliant PoE injectors and midspans for users and power sourcing equipment (PSE) chipsets for system developers that enable both pre-standard and IEEE-compliant PDs to receive up to 90W of power without changing switches or cabling.
ABB Electrification has launched an interactive ‘Smart City’ tool that shows some of the safe, smart and sustainable solutions that can contribute to the design of a comprehensive ‘smart city’. The Smart City tool breaks down the collective technical elements of smart buildings, e-mobility, energy management and data centers, all of which can contribute to the design of a comprehensive ‘smart city’.
To realize the potential of Smart Cities, we’re going to have to figure out the Municipal Internet-of-Things (IoT). We know “smart communities” will utilize an assortment of devices, networks, data and analytics – what we’ll call Municipal IoT. And we know these technologies collectively have the potential to improve many aspects of public service delivery. The best way for the public sector to start making the smart city movement a reality is also the most obvious. Public sector agencies should build and deploy their own IoT networks and identify, test, scale, and share use-cases and applications that are designed specifically to solve their challenges.
18 companies participated testing optical transceiver, #Ethernet switching equipment, and T&M (physical layer and protocol analysis) products at the Ethernet Alliance’s latest High Speed Networking (HSN) Plugfest at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). This was the fourth event to provide participants with the ability to test the interoperability of their products for applications from 25 Gigabit Ethernet to 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The HSN Plugfest drew a greater number of companies than the previous iteration, including some who joined the Ethernet Alliance just so that they could participate.
