Is your city fast enough to be smart?
Matthew Perkins · 2020
Smart Cities rely on robust communications infrastructure to support reliable, high-speed data exchange. As more municipalities consider Smart City applications, particularly in developing country contexts, data availability and transparency is vital. However, data availability is a commonly shared problem. Because of rapid urbanization, particularly in Asia, data which facilitates comparisons over time is particularly useful in contextualizing and understanding success stories and lessons learned to guide these implementations. This paper examines the dataset available from the network performance measurement tool M-lab2 in order to assess suitability for addressing these questions [19]. In the past, data have focused primarily on the existence of broadband connections. However, as applications have grown more sophisticated and complex, it has become increasing necessary to evaluate the quality of service delivered at the user level. Particularly in the case of applications which depend on reliable, high performance connectivity, such as Internet of Things applications, this data is vital to determine whether or not a city is able to deploy a suitable enabling infrastructure environment. As a result of this analysis, a methodology is proposed for determining adequate data coverage rates. Indicators are identified which illustrate the capacity of the network to provide the necessary levels of performance and benchmarks are obtained through comparison with cities which have successfully deployed IoT applications. Finally, the usefulness of these measures for assessing which cities demonstrate appropriate infrastructure performance for the deployment of smart city technologies. By drawing upon this data, government leaders, academics and civil society can obtain useful insight which can promote transparency and realism in selected approaches.