The world is moving into an era of urbanisation, where for the first time, more people are living in towns and cities than in rural areas. The attraction of urban living is plain to see. Cities offer an excellent standard of living with greater employment prospects, instant access to quality medical care, and a vibrant social life. But as cities and populations grow, added strain is placed on infrastructure, while opportunities for criminals are also more abundant. This is why governments are narrowing their focus on public safety and security, and setting aside more funds to help keep citizens safe.
In 2015, more than $5.5 billion was spent on public safety solutions, and this figure is predicted to reach over $8 billion by 2019. At Huawei, we’ve experienced the growth of public safety solutions firsthand, as our safe city services now serve more than 400 million people in 100 cities across 30 countries. All of these figures make something quite clear; governments recognise the need for private sector collaboration when it comes to public safety, for a number of reasons.
The first is the extra value that private sector collaboration can extract. Competition is a driving force behind innovation in the private sector as the threat of rival organisations prompt businesses to constantly find ways to improve their offering. In the public safety space, this means more effective and cost efficient ways of preventing and responding to threats from both criminals (social threats) and natural disasters. It also means a shorter development cycle for these types of services, which speeds up the time it takes for a city to become ‘smarter and safer’.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a perfect example of this quickened innovation cycle. IoT will have a massive impact on safe cities of the future as almost universal LTE connectivity becomes a reality and inexpensive sensor solutions drive the integration of connected devices across metropolitan areas. Anything from traditional CCTV cameras to devices designed to detect the sound of gunshots can send information to a city’s central control platform for analysis, helping public security agencies be better informed and quicker to respond.
Yet steps are already being taken to commercialise IoT in the form of NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT), which will allow the technology to be accessed via low-power wide area networks (LPWANs), and will provide increased connectivity volume as well as enabling better network coverage. NB-IoT will empower organizations – both public and private – to implement smart services without the need to set up their own Wide Area Network (WAN); services which could be focused on better public safety and security that will result in more automation and much faster transaction which means much faster responses to incidents and quicker crime investigations.
Technologies such as IoT are just one piece of a bigger public safety puzzle. As a result, governments and public bodies need to invest in end-to-end solutions that cover all requirements. Integration is therefore a fundamental part of the Safe City concept. The idea is that public security technology such as video surveillance, access control and perimeter protection can be combined with safety elements including weather sensors and even social media analysis on one consolidated Private-Cloud based IT platform. From this centralised place, public security agencies and all other stakeholders are given a complete overview of the city’s safety and security status. With a broad view, intelligence can be gathered from security and safety sources, analysed via a big data solution, and acted upon instantly and even sometimes ahead of incidents that could happen.
For example, license plate recognition (LPR) and face recognition could be used to identify suspect vehicles and people so police forces can take Rapid Real-Time action. Then, with all this data recorded, authorities can quickly go back and examine the information to speed up the post-event investigation. Not only can integrated ICT such as this save lives, it also helps cities to maximise their existing infrastructure and budget.
If a sophisticated, consolidated platform like this is to have the desired impact, public and private organisations must work together to tie a city’s safety needs and challenges to the right ICT options. One of the most valuable outcomes of this process is that threat prevention becomes the focus, rather than cure. While services like our Convergent Command Centre and visualised dispatching can reduce response times significantly, prevention must always be the priority, as this is what ultimately saves more lives and properties.
End-to-end solutions support threat prevention by plugging the gaps in a city’s security infrastructure. Gaps like surveillance blind spots, intermittent LTE network connectivity, Big Data Analytics and slow decision making are all hurdles to preventing threats, among others. Overcoming them with innovative technology can reduce incidences of crime and help to minimise the human impact of a natural disaster. These outcomes are especially beneficial to cities in today’s increasingly urbanised world. Everyone wants to live in a safe environment, so when a city excels at threat prevention, it becomes a selling point to flaunt when trying to attract potential citizens.
As urbanisation grows, so too will the Safe City and the public-private partnerships that make them a reality. And as society and the threats we face change, technology must keep up. Businesses like Huawei have a responsibility to help new leading ICT emerge for the good of a city’s citizens and infrastructure, ultimately creating a safer and better connected world.
To read more about Market trends in Public Safety, feel free to download the white paper: http://hweblog.com/big-data-iot-and-cloud-underpin-safe-city-adoption
