The underlying technologies of Smart Cities are developing nicely - from widespread availability of fibre and connectivity, air interfaces to devices and sensors forming an Internet of Things, open APIs, data management, to increased use of Artificial Intelligence. However, drawing together these underlying technologies, exploiting common data sets into a Smart City platform to achieve real benefit for individuals, businesses and society is hard and complicated. This was the subject of ITP's seminar hosted by BT and boasted a full auditorium with speakers from Vorboss, Nokia, BT and Cisco. ITP's Charlotte Goodwill opened the seminar, welcoming the participants and highlighting the networking opportunities that it offered. Tim Creswick of Vorboss talked about the important role fibre was playing in Smart Cities. Connectivity needs to be regarded as a utility - it needs to be everywhere reaching close to all end points albeit normally with an air interface. It needs to be abundant in terms of bandwidth, latency so we no longer worry about capacity and it needs to be always on, ultra reliable. Although our fibre deployments and topology must support today's Smart City applications, it needs to be flexible enough to cater for future, yet to be conceived needs. This flexibility needs to be reflected in the organisations that provide the infrastructure and Tim referenced the advantages of vertically integrated companies with rapid response times.
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