The Big Benefits of Smart Cities
The big push at networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO 0.29% these days is to create “smart cities,” where wireless networks with enough sensors and computers to process the data will attempt to make services more efficient and lower costs. Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins spoke with Jason Anders, chief news editor of The Wall Street Journal, about how it’s going. Edited excerpts follow.
MR. ANDERS: Why do we need smarter cities?
MR. ROBBINS: Some statistics say that 30% of traffic is created by people looking for parking, so that’s a problem that technology can solve and is solving. We have 70% of the world’s energy usage in cities; 20% of global energy usage is lighting, so connect to LED lighting and leverage technology to actually make them more efficient. You can cut 50% to 75% out of it. There are environmental opportunities. There are efficiency and citizen-service opportunities. There are lots of great opportunities.
MR. ANDERS: Where exactly do you come in? How does this get off the ground?
MR. ROBBINS: It does require infrastructure. Security has to be dealt with up front. The partnerships required to actually make this work are pretty significant.
MR. ANDERS: Some of this isn’t quite Jetsons-level stuff. Garbage pickup doesn’t sound that high tech. But what’s the future of waste management?
MR. ROBBINS: We’ve done things the same way forever. Waste-management vehicles leave, they have a route. They pick up receptacles, and they empty receptacles even if they’re empty. The ability to put sensors inside those—there are applications that have been written now that actually understand where that needs to occur. You can actually put sensors in that measure the presence of toxic materials so safety issues can be addressed.
MR. ANDERS: What are some of the big cities that you’re involved in?
MR. ROBBINS: We’re involved in 120 around the world today. Hamburg has gone all in, particularly in the port. Collaboration between their employees running the dock, communicating to vehicles that are waiting, managing the traffic congestion—everything’s connected, all the sensors, so that they can actually make that seamless.
They’ve increased the productivity of the port and improved the efficiency by 20% just by implementing this technology.
Every city has different things going on. In 2016, I was in Davos and the party secretary of Guangzhou, China, said, “I’d like Cisco to come partner with us to build a smart city in Guangzhou.” And 15 months later, we had shovels, shoveling dirt for the Cisco Guangzhou Smart City Project. We’re building innovation centers. We’re partnered with universities.
MR. ANDERS: Cities are ultimately businesses, and some aren’t well run. I assume the pitch is the technology is good not only for society but for the bottom line and budget. But at the end of the day, someone has to write the check.
MR. ROBBINS: Yeah. I was in a major city last week talking to the mayor, and the discussion quickly got to, “The first-use case has to really create hard dollar savings so that we can then invest those in some of the other things going on. But we need to create money and then show people.”
So investing in, perhaps, reduction of lighting cost to then fund the fundamental change in how citizen services are delivered is how they tend to think about these things.
MR. ANDERS: How does technology bring the city together?
MR. ROBBINS: Chicago’s another example where they’ve aggregated lots of data sources, and they bring that data together and they’re encouraging these hyperlocal applications. We create opportunities for people to live more efficiently, to get to where they’re trying to get to more efficiently, to engage in different conversations about what’s going on locally. And that can extend to social issues, social opportunities.
MR. ANDERS: Is the primary goal of a smarter city to empower me as the citizen or to more closely manage and control and observe me as a customer of city services?
MR. ROBBINS: In general, I think it’s the former, because lower cost should result in lower taxes or at least more efficient use of your taxes or greater services.
Guangzhou obviously moved people out of this location when they created this spot for us to go in with some Chinese partners and build this smart city. But one of the commitments they made to the citizens was that we were going to move them back to this city afterward and they were going to have a better life as a result of it.
MR. ANDERS: This is a hacker’s dream. Now, everything from my garbage can to my Wi-Fi to literally the way I’m driving my kids to school is in a database somewhere and for someone to access.
MR. ROBBINS: It is a pressing issue. We’re moving to this massively distributed virtualized world of technology assets. The network has to actually play a very deep, defensive role. So we’ve been investing in new technologies. We’ve created technology that can determine when malware is present in encrypted traffic without decrypting it, then you can quarantine it. We have to build more of those applications, I think, for this to come to life. But it’s very much a forefront ambition.
MR. ANDERS: Do you worry that you’re creating targets?
MR. ROBBINS: Every day we are. But the way we operate with mobile phones in the enterprise today says that we, as a society, will take the benefit of the technology at a pretty significant risk. The benefits and the productivity enhancements from that technology were so great that we just kind of tried to operate around that and build and work around. I think we’re going to build defenses here, and then, we’re going to quickly adapt as we see things.
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Appeared in the October 24, 2017, print edition as 'The Big Benefits Of Smart Cities.'
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-big-benefits-of-smart-cities-1508810761