2016 Smarter Cities a South African objective - Derek Friend
Derek Friend
Global ICT & Telecommunications Executive | Transforming Growth, Innovation, and Operational Excellence | Investor
Smarter Cities - a South African objective by Derek Friend
"As we move in a digital age Networked Fibre infrastructures and high-capacity mobile networks are paramount to building a future for smarter cities". Said Derek Friend at a recent event on smart cities in Africa.
“With rapid developments in ICT technologies facilitating innovation across smart cities, one only needs to look at the advanced cities of the East, Shanghai and Shenzhen are prime examples of innovation."
"In a recent trip to China, I observed these connected Smart Cities that are working towards a vision of an information-based and connected society. Using improved information transferring communication and big data analytics."
"Developing smart cities is key for South Africa’s growing economy and optimizes municipal services, technologies that reduce environmental impacts and introduces new ICT services that enhance our day to day living experience. That’s besides unlocking unprecedented business opportunities for the South African Telco and Enterprise markets” Said Derek Friend
Representing Huawei - Eastern And South Africa Regional Sales Director
Press Questions>
What aspects of Smart City are you implementing in South Africa?
"Huawei used its expertise gained from working with global government sectors to develop and implement the e-Government platform. Based on an all IP network, the e-Government solution supports data access and high speed transmission and enhances service connection and data processing, It provides high-bandwidth services, reduces operational risks, and enhances system reliability."
“We implemented a government cloud platform to provide a secure isolation between government sectors and tenants, the network supports self-management and self-maintenance, shifting services to an independent cloud-based platform, promoting data and ubiquitous information sharing."
“We use a collaborative office platform to adapt to the multi-level organizational structure; this supports better collaboration between government offices.”
"The Smart City includes intelligent sensors across the city, facilitating urban management with intelligent video surveillance (IVS) systems. Video data is integrated through wired and wireless networks, building an urban public safety platform. This uses technology such as cloud computing, storage, and enables proactive prevention, on demand information updates, quick response, and fast backtracking” said Derek Friend
Describe your work with the government regarding Smart Cities in SA.
“We work with local Governments to provide technology solutions for a Smart Industry, and Smart Life solutions, by integrating urban management, enterprise development, and an ICT eco system across a ubiquitous network, by making full use of modern communications network topology solutions, independent cloud computing, and information collaboration. The solution my teams and our partners implements are a total end to end solution that promotes stable urban development and optimal resource utilization, that boosts urban intelligence coverage and increases operational efficiency, sustainability, and overall citizen satisfaction.”
"A smart city represents a municipality city's ICT capabilities and competitiveness. It allows for open and transparent government networking by using a unified database management platform. The Smart City promotes continuous economic growth as well as secure, intelligent and digital innovations to attract strategic investment opportunities and other sophisticated enterprise environment to its high-tech parks."
"The solution provides professional IT services from cloud-based data centres to help enterprises develop businesses and urban economy, providing faster technical support to the whole tourism industry chain, and encourages South African tourisms own economic growth in our own cities."
"Smart applications are used in interactive platforms for real-time traffic information, critical health care, and smarter education. Improving a city's service level, community satisfaction, and generally increasing our quality of everyday life.
“With the growing popularity of IoT and cloud computing, mobile Internet, and smart terminals, we also able to use better ICT solutions across South Africas health care industry, today we see Smart Hospitals developing and has become an important part of our national strategic government planning. The government and private sectors focus on developing these smart hospitals, which bring enormous social and economic benefits .” Said Derek Friend
“The Huawei Smart Hospital Solution covers everything from the digital systems of hospital management and clinical information to the infrastructure construction of wired and wireless networks and data centers."
"For different application scenarios, Smart Hospital solutions provides a hospital private cloud and IT-based platform for collaborative telemedicine, desktop cloud, unified communications, one secure data base for patent records, video surveillance, primary care information and on demand mobile hospital services. Today’s Smart Hospital see a vast improvement of patient services, medical service efficiency and quality, reduced hospital OPEX, and improved hospital management skills.” Explained Derek Friend
What best practice Smart City planning and implementation from other countries are you hoping to replicate in South Africa.
"The Smart City Technologies use global open-source Cloud Computing and network industry standards, and the Huawei IT Product Line which focuses on IT infrastructure and provides state of the art server, storage, cloud computing products as well as data centre solutions. Huawei promotes the global concept of a "Swift, Smart, Soft, Simple" (4S) concept this methodology contributes to the world's leading network energy solution of site energy and data centre infrastructure. (Which we are bringing to all of Africa.) and now replicating into major cites.
"Following best practice if an IP Network and LTE end to end product line such as our portfolio of routers, switches, WLAN, network security, optical transmission, microwave, PON, and network management products is used in the solution."
"The Huawei global products also provide enterprise customers with three wireless communication solutions: eLTE broadband trunking, eLTE broadband access, and GSM-R. The Huawei UC&C Product Line provides five core products for unified communications, contact center, converged conference, telepresence, and surveillance. The unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) international solutions are characterized by mobility, convergence, and cloud collaboration."
“By deploying a smart City in your city with a converged voice services for office, intercom, and emergency telephones with an IP-based video surveillance solution enhances quick response and remote command capabilities at all levels assisting roadside emergency management, a Multi-mode network access using a GPON network because of its high bandwidth, long-distance transmission, and diversified terminal ports providing comprehensive access for highway e-tolls, emergency calls, intercom calls, surveillance, information boards, and advanced warning weather information. A dynamic unified service bearer uniformly carries the data, voice, video, and office services at lightning speeds.”
Huawei, as a leading global ICT solutions provider, has valuable global experience in Smart City solutions. Featuring the most extensive product line in the industry, Huawei has provided Smart City solutions for 60+ cities across 20+ countries and regions
"Smart City includes Smart Government, Safe City, Smart Emergency Command, Smart Food Quality Control, Smart Transport, Smart Hospital, Smart Education, Smart Grid, Smart Enterprise, and Smart Tourism."
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"This Smart Safe City makes full use of universal integrated data resources throughout a city with a unified management and analysis platform. The solution enables the government to gain a comprehensive "view" of its cities and to take responsive and immediate actions or make better and faster educated decisions. The solution consists of a ubiquitous network, video in the cloud, IVS management platform, video searching, information security management, an integrated command center, multimedia trunking, and monitoring and alarm subsystems. It improves the interoperability of different systems, combines various application systems, and builds a comprehensive IVS system for urban public safety and security."
What other private companies are you partnering with regarding SA Smart Cities?
"Todays demands for building a high-quality smart city, covers multiple sectors, including city management, emergency command, public and private security, and healthcare. That are unable to connect different functional sectors for lack of a unified information system; without IoT, - in the past city management was restricted to manual intervention. So we partner with collaborative Enterprise companies through our Channel at Epsidon Technology (First distribution) and Carriers that have the expertise that can deploy our comprehensive end to end portfolio and command platforms to interconnect these applications and eradicate information silos."
"We are working with multiple Companies that are deploying these application systems, including our Smart City, Digital City management platforms, Emergency Command platforms, and Smart Hospital networks, and recently have done a serious of workshops across the country to make our resellers aware of the horizontals and verticals of the end to end products."
"Companies that can dynamically allocate resources based on IoT and cloud computing or Unified monitoring , integration partners that enable collaboration and linkage of multiple peripheral units and multi-platforms; companies that are able to deploy strategically connecting system with the public security system"
What are the challenges and solutions to implementing Smart Cities in South Africa?
"Traditionally South Africa has struggled with a ubiquitous quality network infrastructure, however as we see a faster growth of ICT technologies and fibre roll out across facilitates increased urban construction and development projects and coverage of advanced wireless networks and better spectrum usage such as 4/ 5G mobile broadband that is making this connectivity possible; other mainstream technologies and solutions such as cloud computing makes data sharing and integration, data mining and analysis possible; a faster Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solution is allowing cross-sector collaboration and increases urban management and emergency response efficiency. "
"As the core of urban management, a municipal government may face challenges from public safety, urban transport, emergency handling, energy management, and environmental protection.
"Smart Governments are now able to use a cloud-based data center to share and integrate data, and collaborate with different sectors to optimize resource utilization and improve governmental efficiency.
We provide solutions that support the global interconnections, state of the art technology decreasing latency and driving information across South Africa" concludes Derek Friend.
In the continuous pursuit to position the City of Ekurhuleni as a major role player in the Gauteng city region, the city presented its Strategic Urban Development Plan to business stakeholders during the quarterly sitting of the City Meets Business meeting, in Kempton Park, on Tuesday, last week (26 August 2016)
The city’s Strategic Urban Development (SUD) plan is a large-scale strategy which guides development in city, as it envisaged in the Growth and Development Strategy (GDS) 2055, Integrated Development Plan (IDP), Metropolitan Spatial Development Framework (MSDF) and Capital Investment Framework (CIF).
“The roll-out of the city’s urban development plans is aimed at encouraging local industrialists to get involved in the various developments of the city, and to contribute meaningfully to the greater provincial economic spectrum by participating in building the economy and ultimately attracting foreign investment into the city,” said Pieter Swanepoel, divisional head for special projects in Ekurhuleni’s City Planning Department.
Ekurhuleni currently has 10 key proposed priority developments that are critical in advancing the municipality’s goal of implementing its strategic urban development plans.
Some of these developments include Carnival Junction, in Brakpan, the Prasa-Gibela train manufacturing plant in Dunnottar, the Twenty-One Industrial Park, the Tambo Springs Inland Port, Glen Gory, Farm Leeuwpoort, Green Reef, Riversfield, Lords View and S and J.
Carnival Junction is currently a hive of construction activity, with an extensive, large-scale mixed use development, anticipated to develop in phases over the horizon of 15 to 20 years.
The development comprises of mixed land uses, varying from mega retail stores such as Makro, Build-It, Virgin Active, automotive outlets, to office parks and even a private hospital.
Recently the City of Ekurhuleni committed 72 hectares of land to the ground-breaking Prasa-Gibela train manufacturing plant in Dunnottar, which is set to create over 2 000 job opportunities.
This is one of the city’s initiatives to achieve the desired goal of being a productive industrial hub of Gauteng.
Among other major advances, the city is executing for the purpose of infrastructure development is the initial implementation phase of the Twenty-One Industrial Park, a fully-fledged mixed-use development that will provide industrial, business, retail and residential opportunities.
The development is deemed a catalyst for economic development and job creation within a strategic location adjacent to the Albertina Sisulu Corridor in Kempton Park.
Ekurhuleni has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Transnet and the Gauteng Provincial Government, which allows for collaboration and co-operation towards the planned Springs Inland Port.
This hub is in line with the Gauteng spatial model located along the N3 freeway and the K146 and K148, PWV and K-routes.
“As the city we welcome the captains of industry taking interest in undertaking these major developments in our area, and we are always ready to assist where necessary, so as to allow mass participation in the development of our economy,” said Swanepoel.
"You are welcome to book a walk through at the Huawei Experience center in Johannesburg that was launched last week with myself, and our team of experts will be on hand to discuss the latest technology that global Governments are deploying" - said Derek Friend
Links on presentation