Ban Chang in Thailand, a city lying between Bangkok and Pattaya, will be one of the first ‘smart cities’ to major on Open RAN 5G infrastructure for coordinated deployments between the public and private sectors. This has put the spotlight on the role of converged networks in metropolitan planning.
The announcement came from US-based RAN and core software developer Mavenir, which is involved in the project alongside local 5G city technology specialist 5GCT, and Cisco, the latter providing switching hardware and application services.
The decision to run Open RAN in millimeter wave spectrum and include Cisco as a partner rather than one of the big three RAN firms is a significant move for the country and for the profile of challenger RAN suppliers like Mavenir in the emerging Open RAN ecosystem.
The smart city project is part of the Digital Thailand initiative, a blueprint for economic growth and industrial plan. The city slots into the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) development plan, part of Thailand’s Industry 4.0 strategy to revitalize and enhance industry along its more developed eastern seaboard. Kanit Sangsubhan, secretary general for the Thai government’s EEC office, launched this first 5G pilot in Ban Chang, declaring the city as part of “Thailand’s progressive smart cities within the EEC”.
The initiative has wider implications for the mobile industry given that Cisco has been deliberating its strategy for 5G. Over the past few years it has repositioned to target growth opportunities in 5G, looking to Open RAN as an entry point to build on its hardware and software for orchestration, 5G core, backhaul and edge computing, even in the absence of a RAN offering. This led to earlier speculation Cisco might move to acquire Ericsson or Nokia, although the American company appeared to rule that out on the basis either European giant would be too expensive and indigestible. Instead, Cisco is looking to proceed by stealth on the back of Open RAN and we can expect it to be involved in more projects like the Thai Ban Chang deployment.
It is also significant for the smart city, a concept which has tended to suffer from lack of clear definition. Cities such as Singapore that have been considered leading examples in the past have tended to involve a variety of developments such as green roofs and expanded pedestrian areas, as well as specific technological projects around environmental control, that are not joined up and have not all involved mobile communications. The focus of Thailand’s initiative is to consolidate communications around 5G and position smart cities as hubs of broader national industrial initiatives that make particular sense for developing countries.
Thailand has, in fact, identified 10 vertical sectors for investment that will be yoked together by smart city infrastructures radiating out to industrial sites. Of these five are established sectors, that is automotive, smart electronics, advanced agriculture and biotechnology, food processing, and tourism.
The five emerging industries being promoted are robotics for industrial and consumer applications; integrated aviation, comprising repair, spare parts and training; medical hubs and integrated wellness centers; the bio-economy, particularly biochemicals and biofuels; and advanced petrochemical industries. These together have been identified as focal points of the Thailand 4.0 initiative.
It is worth glimpsing at other smart cities for context, noting that the struggle for definition has led to different assessments over which tier one metro zones ones rank most highly.
The World Competitiveness Yearbook published annually by the Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD) on the competitiveness of nations, ranked Singapore the world’s smartest city in 2020, as it had done before. This was on the basis of developments across various domains that did not all rely heavily on integrated communications, including efficient, sustainable and affordable public transportation.
There was emphasis on remote monitoring and digital services where wireless communications have come into play, as well as somewhat more chillingly extensive surveillance with over 500,000 cameras and web-based police portals. High levels of urban safety and technological resilience are “an adept indicator of a smart city”, according to IMD, but the pursuance of this objective through extensive surveillance would be resisted by libertarian and privacy groups elsewhere.
Surveillance is also a major feature in Shanghai, which won the World Smart City Award 2020 from the Smart City Expo World Congress, an international summit technological revolution in urban life. This did not mention the safety aspects directly but highlighted the Smart Shanghai－People-Oriented Smart City digital infrastructure project leading to ‘Dual Gigabit’ city status with 5G coverage in the downtown area and fiber reaching 99% of the metropolitan area. In fact, Shanghai now has over 25,000 outdoor 5G base stations and 31,000 indoor, more than any other city in China, according to its municipal authorities.
There was actually an oblique reference to surveillance in the judges’ comments with mention of innovative application of AI algorithms to predict impending emergencies and provide decision support for service handling, on the back of trending social topics. There was also mention of IoT applications to “ensure public security”.
One notable sub-plot here, in the light of the supposed escalating hi-tech cold war between China and the USA, is Microsoft’s partnership for AI and IoT technology with medical robot start-up TMiRob, based in the city. TMiRob, we may recall, made headlines over a year ago when its disinfecting and ward robots were dispatched to hospitals in Wuhan to help control the Covid-19 outbreak there.
Meanwhile, management consultancy Roland Berger came to a yet different decision over which world city was smartest just before the pandemic, awarding that accolade to Vienna with London ranked second ahead of the Asian contenders.
In this case judgement was rooted more in communications infrastructure, with Vienna praised for having deployed integrated services for mobility and the environment, as well as an advanced e-health approach and open government data. It had adopted a standardized monitoring system for all smart city projects coordinated by a central unit pooling technical expertise and promoting links between the various ‘actors’ in city administration, research, business and industry.
Roland Berger considered with some justification that smart cities should now be judged on their integration strategies, which only 10% of those analyzed at the time had.