Natural municipal competitiveness is leading cities to outbid each other in the smartness stakes and this is helping galvanize projects and overcome barriers to deployment, such as reluctance by local planners. It is also, with the help of emerging 5G infrastructures, playing a role in reducing economic divides, or attempting to do so, under the banner of ‘levelling up’.
This mantra has been applied to the City of Sunderland in the UK, which has announced it is aiming to become the country’s “most advanced smart city” following an agreement between its council and UK-based telecoms system integrator BAI Communications to build a new “5G-centric network” for boosting adoption of digital services for various sectors including manufacturing and logistics, education and social care.
BAI has been contracted over 20 years to design, build and operate what is billed as a next generation digital infrastructure framed around a private 5G network using small cell architecture. The city council is aiming to capitalize on the UK smart city and digital council award it won at the Connected Britain event in September 2021.
A bigger reason, perhaps, for favoring Sunderland as a leading smart city is the presence of Japanese automotive giant Nissan, which established a major European manufacturing hub there in the mid-1980s. That has prospered since and survived even the existential threat posed by Brexit, the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
Nissan selected Sunderland partly as a result of central government incentives, including very generous purchasing prices for the land at agricultural rates, and partly because the city had a relatively highly skilled workforce willing to sacrifice some of the previous levels of union protection, as a result of the almost simultaneous decline of the coal mining and shipbuilding industries in the region.
The current smart city project has been pegged around Nissan, which has been offered a new 5G-based facility under the banner of Industry 4.0 and will also play in some of the application projects, such as increased supply chain agility, which will feature further development of self-driving vehicle trials, especially autonomous heavy goods vehicles for transfer of goods via platooning of trucks. The latter is widely considered to be the first viable use case for autonomous driving on public roads, posing a far lower risk to other motorists than widespread self-driving cars.
The first phase of the project will involve roll-out of a backbone 5G network based on a neutral host model around the summer of 2022. This will provide a platform encouraging business growth and innovation, supporting the UK government’s claimed agenda of reducing the currently huge economic disparity between such northern cities and the south of England, especially London, by bringing social and economic benefits to residents, businesses and visitors.
As Patrick Melia, chief executive at the city council, explained: “This is an incredibly significant milestone in the development and future of Sunderland Our Smart City. We are very much looking forward to our 20-year strategic partnership with BAI, as its team helps us realize our ambitions and make our goals a reality. We are confident the benefits of this partnership will reach every resident, organization and business within our city and indeed the wider area.”
Melia pointed to various use cases, such as education through online and remote learning across the city’s schools, and social care, where the greater reach and capacity of 5G will expand existing deployments of assistive technologies for vulnerable people, using sensors in their homes.
Another aspect that will be evaluated is the benefit of integration between previously disparate systems. Rather like the intelligent building, the smart city has in practice grown up as a series of islands that are disconnected, even if they rely to growing extents on common wireless connectivity, whether this is 5G, one of the cellular low power WAN variants, or an unlicensed spectrum option such as LoRaWAN.
Such islands include intelligent management of parking spaces, street lighting control, and optimized waste management, which all provide benefits by themselves but can achieve further gains in productivity or cost savings through integration. This can lead to better data-driven decision-making at a council level and more effective assessment of priorities. There is scope for greater levels of automation and also revenue generation through dynamic pricing for various services.
There are also potential downsides, or at least challenges, one of relevance in Sunderland being the risk that, while it may level up the city as a whole, it may accentuate divides within it, if the benefits tend towards the more affluent and digitally savvy. There is also the ever-present cybersecurity dimension resulting from increased reliance on computation and connectivity.
These are good reasons for preceding with care rather than winding back on deployments. Cases such as Sunderland will be valuable as laboratories of greater integration at the city level around 5G, for assessing whether it contributes to greater equality of experience.