Solution Brief | Turn Existing Streetlights into Actionable Data Sources and Revenue Streams 2 Business Challenge: Population Growth Outpaces Budgets The global population is exploding and is expected to grow from 7.3 billion to 8.5 billion people by 2030. By 2050 it is expected to exceed 9.7 billion. 2 Today, 54 percent of the population live in urban areas, but by 2050 that number is expected to be 66 percent. 3 This presents multiple challenges for cities with limited investment budgets. Today, cities are implementing several commonly used solutions, such as police surveillance and traffic monitoring. But each solution is designed for a specific application or outcome and uses different technology. The police department may install a camera in a busy public square to prevent criminal activity and improve their ability to respond in emergencies, while the department of transportation may install a different camera in the same area to monitor traffic congestion and parking issues. Consolidating on a single, horizontal platform that can accommodate various existing and new applications can help cities provide greater services while reducing costs. Cities possess massive investments in existing infrastructure. Leveraging that infrastructure, rather than replacing it, can help cities rapidly implement modern solutions and save money. A horizontal platform that uses already-installed streetlights can accommodate new applications, open new revenue opportunities, improve civic involvement, and enhance the city's safety and livability. Digital Infrastructure Creates Thriving Cities Most cities suffer from traffic congestion and parking problems, and rising populations will only make those problems worse. San Diego, California recently upgraded its existing streetlights with Current's energy-efficient Evolve* LED luminaries and intelligent nodes to help address these problems. Data collected from the intelligent nodes opens extraordinary opportunities to improve the city experience. For example, software developers can use actionable data from the Internet of Things (IoT) platform to build smartphone applications that both guide drivers to available parking and also let them pay. The availability of apps since 2008 has grossed nearly USD 40 billion for developers. 4 There are presently 21 million software developers worldwide, and the number is rising. 5 They have already proven what can be done with a smartphone when accumulated data is made available. Cities will be the next beneficiaries of the app economy. The possibilities are endless. With data collected from the intelligent nodes, a network of solution providers is partnering with cities to develop and install applications that integrate with the IoT platform, including these use cases: • Citizen safety. Law enforcement can respond faster and more effectively with situational intelligence and automatic gunshot detection and location using data collected by intelligent nodes in real time. • Transportation optimization. Real-time traffic information reduces congestion and improves modeling for vehicle, pedestrian, and bike movement. Monitoring on-street parking helps drivers find available spaces faster, and improves incremental parking revenue while decreasing congestion. • Environmental monitoring. Air quality can be monitored on a hyperlocal level, detecting pollution, pollen counts, and identifying hazardous conditions. Coupled with alerting technology, information can be delivered to people in the area through smartphones or with speakers installed on the streetlight. • Citizen services. Wi-Fi, phone charging, and digital signage can improve daily life for citizens while offering new revenue streams to cities. Today's city infrastructure can help deliver the data for tomorrow's applications. Solution Value: Actionable Data Transforms Cities AT&T Smart Cities* digital infrastructure with Current*, powered by General Electric (GE) is built on Intel® technology and provides a universal intelligent node that can be installed on any streetlight. The unique intelligent node embedded with many sensors is extensible through over-the-air updates that allow analytics, provide connection to neighboring devices, and can perform multisensor fusion over a secure cloud connection. Intelligent nodes on streetlights can instantly see, hear, feel, and talk using cameras, microphones, and environmental sensors that collect temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, noise, lighting, and compass data. Intel technology provides advanced processing and edge analytics necessary to achieve this. Digital infrastructure lays the foundation for a horizontal platform that all city departments can connect to and use. Instead of individual departments installing and managing hardware for their own specific purposes, they can now use the data collected by intelligent streetlight poles. Police can stream video on demand for situational awareness while transportation can use the aggregated and analyzed metadata to monitor and plan traffic control (see Figure 2). Digital infrastructure with GE's Predix* Industrial IoT Cloud OS makes actionable sensor data available through the open, yet secured, APIs for real-time intelligence. This allows citizens, the developer community, entrepreneurs, and other organizations with niche expertise to transform that data into applications that deliver new city services, optimize operations, and improve citizens' quality of life. Open, Interoperable Solution Interoperable Works with other products and platforms Future Proof Over-the-air updates and ability to add new sensors Open Real-time, shareable data Figure 2. Actionable data, such as the number of vehicles, their size, direction, and speed, is collected with intelligent nodes and made available to solution developers through open APIs.
