NB-IoT is enabling towns and cities to improve service delivery and revenue collection.
Smart cities can start becoming affordably scalable and reliable, thanks to a new network technology called Narrowband IoT.
A smart city involves many services that do their own thing. It’s like a smartphone: a single device that is home to dozens of different services, from WhatsApp messages to GPS navigation.
A smart city is the same, home to services like smart water and electricity meters, intelligent traffic tracking, trackable garbage bins, and monitoring street lights. As a city adds smart services, it grows into a smart city, leveraging the efficiencies and insights created by data, artificial intelligence, and automation.
Why LTE is better for phones than sensors
However, for these services to work, they need to be connected. Standard networks are not great at that task. Let’s take LTE as an example. LTE is a serious network technology designed to move large amounts of data at very high speeds. A side-effect of this capacity is that your phone uses more power to run its antenna and communications equipment.
That’s not a problem for a smartphone because you can plug it in to charge every day. But a sensor on a water meter or under a bridge needs to run for years without recharging.
LTE and many other network technologies are not the best-suited for IoT (Internet of Things) devices like sensors. For a smart city to grow, it needs to connect those IoT devices. But there is an answer: Narrowband IoT, also called NB-IoT.
NB-IoT: a dedicated lane for smart city devices
Mobile networks use frequencies to manage what types of data they carry. We can compare these frequencies to lanes on a highway. Technologies like LTE are like a highway with many lanes to support a lot of traffic. NB-IoT is a dedicated lane that only carries certain types of traffic, such as data for smart city devices.
This distinction makes NB-IoT incredibly efficient and very light on power consumption. Devices on a NB-IoT network can run for years (sometimes a decade or longer) before needing to recharge.
NB-IoT signals also travel much further and through more crowded areas, including built-up areas, indoors, and underground. It can also support hundreds of thousands of devices on a single deployment.
Perhaps best of all, a deployment doesn’t require new network towers. NB-IoT uses the same network towers as other mobile services. This means that a city can, for example, consistently monitor thousands of traffic lights using the same network that connects their phones. It radically reduces the complexity and cost of creating smart monitoring.
Several local municipalities are already using smart city technologies to gain improvements. For example, the Naledi Municipality in North-West Province improved billing accuracy and can detect tampering when it installed electric smart meters.
Expanding service delivery with smart networks
NB-IoT reduces the cost and complexity of IoT deployments. There was a time when having a smart city was a very daunting project. But thanks to NB-IoT, delivered by telecommunications leaders like Vodacom, smart cities are now within reach for even small towns. The same technology is also changing agriculture, logistics, and manufacturing, using world-class mobile networks as their backbone.
NB-IoT can turn any building, street, and suburb into a source of data, visibility, and informed decisions. Track bins before they overflow. Catch leaks, theft, and tampering. Create streamlined plans and workflows to tackle dark streetlights and dysfunctional traffic signals. Bill customers accurately. These technologies are changing cities and towns across the world, and they are reshaping service delivery in South Africa.
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