Smart City is a buzz phrase Nigeria’s political office holders like to throw around when they attend a technology conference abroad or they are trying to woo foreign investors to invest in the country.
Successive leaderships in Lagos State, Nigeria’s most populous state and the nerve center of its commercial activities are quick to point to two or three smart city projects they have going on.
But going by the sorry state of fixed wireless and wired technology in the country, the reality of a smart city may take at least a decade to achieve.
Data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) showed that the growth of fixed wireless and wired technology remained at 0.1 percent by the first half of 2019. This is unlike mobile technology (GSM) which has grown by 99.70 percent in the same period.
According to McLaren Duncan and Agyeman Julian authors of the 2015 book, ‘Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities’ a smart city refers to an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently. This includes data collected from citizens, devices, and assets that are processed and analysed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, information systems, schools, libraries, and other community services.
Mckinsey research projects that smart city industry will be a $400 billion market by 2020 and these cities are expected to generate 60 percent of the world’s GDP by 2025.
Giving that 68 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas, by 2050 according to the United Nations, it does make sense to see why Nigerian leaders believe that developing smart cities is the future. It also represents an opportunity to repurposed many Nigerian cities into well planned urban centers. Currently, nearly all of them are built regardless of laid down city plans.
Nigeria’s first serious step into smart city projects was the Nigerian Smart City Initiative (NSCI) in August 2017. The NSCI plans to rely heavily on the application of ICT and smart technologies in the administration, development, and management of Nigerian cities with a view to achieving better connectivity in the transport sector, secured environment, decent affordable housing, efficient sanitary and waste disposal system, urban regeneration and upgrade in the cities. The initiative intends to cover more than 50 percent of all Nigerian cities.
With the coming on board of the NSCI, the federal government through the ministry of Communication, pledged commitment to provision of the required infrastructures and application of smart concepts to transform Nigeria’s urban areas into functional, safe, serene and responsive cities capable of satisfying the demand of the city dwellers at sustainable levels. This reliance on ICT for national physical development is also meant to push the country to a position of a technology hub in Africa sub-region.
A smart city derives its concept from the internet of things (IoT), crowdsensing and cyber-physical cloud computing which enables it to provide a comprehensive network of connected devices. In addition, smart sensors and big data analytics to enable the move from IoT to real-time control.
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In other words, the amount of internet capacity required to power a smart city is beyond the scope of what a mobile technology network can handle and at less than one percent investment in fixed wireless and wired technology Nigeria basically not ready.
Mobile technology or Global System for Mobile Communication which is the most widely used in the world, is an open and digital cellular technology used for transmitting mobile voice and data services operate at 850MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz frequency bands. In terms of capacity, the digital system has an ability to carry 64 Kbps to 120 Mbps of data rates.
Fixed wireless technology, on the other hand, is a super high-speed, dedicated, broadband service that has the capacity to connect enabled devices to the internet. It offers symmetric bandwidth speeds that are suitable for organizations that require reliable access to the internet for constant upload and download, instant browsing, video conferencing and other forms of business collaborations that depend on the internet.
Examples of technologies required to power a smart city include Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), fog computing, cloud computing, and big data analytics. Utilizing these technologies provides many advantages and services in smart cities.
Fixed wireless shares some similarities, particularly in terms of carrying capacity and network reliability with wired technology. The major difference is that in the case of the latter there is a physical connection to a physical location (home or business) through a cable.
For Nigeria to build and sustain a smart city, it requires reliable and robust networking and communication infrastructures to enable the efficient exchange of messages among the different components of the systems that provide a particular service. It also needs to adopt a long-term approach like prioritizing investment in fiber connectivity and creating an enabling environment for fixed wireless investors to thrive. Smart cities are typically served by different networks built by traditional telcos, cable operators, emerging internet providers like Google, neutral host providers, utilities and municipalities and Nigeria should be investing in this.
