Telecoms Take a Backseat, 5G Hype Fades

Hi everybody, I'm Diana Blass with Current Insights at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona. A big topic we're digging into this week, what is the role of telecoms in a smart city world? Well, earlier we spoke to a company who's revolutionizing the way that smart city applications get their connectivity. Listen to this. Traditional connectivity. not IoT connectivity so the traditional connectivity player is playing a different game and for the majority of traditional connectivity players IoT is still a little crumbled sometimes it's less than 10% of their yearly revenues so what they do what they plan what they develop is not aimed for IoT only so I'm Luigi Capobianco I'm the vice president of SAITS for southern and Western Europe for once so once is IOT operator, it's the first IOT cellular operator in Europe. We are partnered with Deutsche Telekom, so with T -Mobile. You pay us as you are buying a component, so you pay up front and everything is included for 10 years. For example, let's say you are in the smart city, right, and you install parking monitoring devices, all right? So each parking monitor device, can have his own connectivity, his own SIM card, right? So today what you need to do is buy a SIM card through a contract, put it in this device, install the device and every month you need to pay one euro, two euro, whatever. In our case you build your own sensor, you buy our connectivity as you buy the 2G modem or the Narrowband modem. You pay 10 euros, you plug it in your device, install the device and you forget about it. Now here at the Smart City Expo we actually spoke with a company who has partnered with ONCE for its connectivity solutions, Urban Control is using ONCE to power its smart streetlight solution. I mean, we are launching a new device, our newest streetlighting controller, which is a low -power cellular device, which takes the advantage of the cellular network infrastructure out there, everywhere around the world. For these kind of solutions, where you want to low data rate but also at the lowest cost once provides this I think it's totally disruptive way of managing their partners and customers which is providing a flat rate over ten years besides all the functionalities besides where portal the API's the service customer support it comes as IDC says telecoms are part of the solution They're not actually, I mean, they're a point solution within it. And as I said, there's so much hype around the 5G and I have great difficulty finding real examples of where 5G is actually working. 5G is not really business-ready, I would say, but it's definitely something we're aiming to and what we think would improve our business through 5G is not only selling 5G connectivity, but also helping companies understand how should I use 5G? should I do I need 5G or can I use now but can I actually use 4G right that's also our job I mean I think that's an interesting next question then what are the applications that companies should be thinking about with 5G so within the smart city for example definitely V2X and also vehicle to everything smart lighting adaptive lighting they don't really need 5G but because the frequency at which they need to communicate is not that high all the waste management it's very fine with 4g in some countries is very fine with 2g all the water metering they use narrowband now narrowband is made for these things all the micro mobility for example they can easily use 4g for example right 5g it's it's going to be using all these applications that need to react quicker than our brain 5g might enable more might enable more sensors deployed which means more data and enriching the number of sensors means even more data, qualifiable data. So for me 5G can really enable in that sense in reaching the last mile even better and connecting sensor where as of today is not convenient. But will telecoms play a role in deploying that 5G? From our investigation at the Smart City Expo, it's it seems they have some competition. For more coverage from the Smart City Expo, be sure to stick with Current Insights. Till next time, I'm Diana Blass.