Cisco Names 10 Cities Using Its Cloud-Based Smart Service

From Paris to Kansas City, Cities Monitor Traffic, Parking, And Air Pollution With Sensors And Central Dashboards 

Cisco, which has been promoting its smart city technologies for more than two years, announced today that 10 cities, including Paris and Copenhagen, are using their cloud-based service to communicate in real time with traffic, parking and environmental sensors.

Insights from the data collected by the Internet of Things sensors can help cities streamline their operations, reduce costs, and respond more quickly to emergencies, Cisco said.

Cisco introduces this technology at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2016 in Barcelona. The network giant calls its service the Cisco Smart + Connected Digital Platform.

"With the Internet of Things boom, we are creating value in the smart city," said Munish Khetrapal, managing director of solutions for smart and connected communities in an interview. "Real-time data is important because a two-minute faster response to an emergency can save thousands of dollars."

Cisco provides smart city networks and sensors that can warn winter motorists of the location of black ice fields so they can slow down or move in a different direction, Khetrapal said. Such a network could also be set up for dynamic billing so that a city would grant a toll discount to drivers taking a less congested route.

"Real-time data enables more informed decisions and reduces energy consumption," he said. Cisco has been working in stealth mode on the platform for three years, he said. Today, Cisco announced that eight cities use the technology in addition to Paris and Copenhagen. They are Kansas City, Mo .; Schenectady, N.Y. Adelaide, Australia; Bucharest, Hungary; Dubrovnik, Croatia; Bangalore, India; Jaipur, India; and Trencin, Slovakia.

By using the platform, Cisco can securely connect the data of all operations in a city, including water management, traffic, parking, lighting, neighborhood security, and more.

In some cities, some data is passed on to citizens and businesses. For example, retailers could see heatmaps showing where the heaviest foot traffic is located near stores. Such data would be anonymous to protect users' privacy. In the case of data from video sensors, faces are blurred, Cisco said.

Many cities work on a common interface or dashboard to connect all the different sensor data. Cisco has created APIs (third-party application programming interfaces) for city managers and other officials to create dashboards.

In one example, Cisco showed Paris using a dashboard from Place de la Nation to monitor parking, street lighting, traffic, and crowds. The Paris Dashboard can also show how many people are in a tourist area and how much time they spend there on average.

Crowds can be counted with video sensors, but also by counting the number of smartphones and tablets connected to a Wi-Fi zone in an area, Cisco said.

Crowd data could also be used to automatically call for more buses or taxis to be displayed nearby. Using multiple datasets, traffic workers could access environmental sensor data to find ways to reduce congestion and air pollution while improving emergency response times, Cisco said.

"For Smart Cities, we have to ... make it so easy to connect new 'things' together so new information can be collected, analyzed and shared," said Cisco Senior Vice President Rowan Trollope on a blog.

Khetrapal said that cities with Cisco's platform can save millions of dollars by building their own networks to connect data from sensors to servers. Using the example of a car park monitoring service, he estimates that between $ 1 and $ 1.10 per parking space per day would cost to install sensors and safely maintain the network. In a parking garage with 1,000 parking spaces that would be about 365,000 dollars per year.

Cisco will not manufacture the sensors and will work with dozens of partners who manufacture them. Cisco will certify the capabilities of various sensors and will help city officials select the sensors they need, Khetrapal said. The company also works with infrastructure and mobile operators, including AT & T, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom and the engineering, consulting and infrastructure company Black & Veatch.

Cisco will also work with IBM to provide its platform for cities, providing IBM Analytics software. "The uniqueness of Cisco is the ability to connect and merge multiple [network and device] protocols," Khetrepal said.

would help cities aggregate data that impacted their operations to improve efficiency and long-term planning.

"Most cities are unbelievable in silos, where things like parking and traffic and waste management are separate systems," he said. "It's hard to get most cities to connect everything together, but that's the holy grail for smart cities."

Meanwhile, vendors like Cisco are having to prove viability for cities that use smart technologies that result in lower power and water consumption, or even less crime, Hilton said.

The best ROI in smart city projects has been achieved by installing energy-efficient street lights that can be automatically dimmed at the right times, Hilton said. However, it is a slow and deliberate process of getting cities to add more sensors to a city-wide network.

"Cities can not do everything at once," he added. "Cities will catch up, but it will not happen overnight."

Even Cisco's Trollope admitted that smart city returns are slow. "The results will not come overnight, but changes will happen faster than you might expect," he wrote.

Kansas City will fully deploy the Cisco platform approximately three months after its first collaboration with Cisco about three years ago, said Bob Bennett, Chief Innovation Officer.

Data from multiple sources, including sensors, are used to assess the city's progress through four priorities set by the Mayor of Kansas City, Sly James: efficiency, enforcement, economic development, and education. In each category, multiple calculations are designed to "provide a holistic view of a problem, rather than just a single piece of data leading to a single decision," Bennett said in an email.

For example, Kansas City wanted to monitor the leak of the water system more closely and use data from mass movements to assess its economic activity. Bennett said in May it was possible that the city would use sensors to follow a crowd walking from a busy downtown intersection to see which restaurants are most popular. From there, the city could draw conclusions about what makes a restaurant or another destination more popular.

The city could also detect sensors if the water pressure in a particular environment drops or old lines are leaking.