How 5G will be key to smart city growth and change how we interact with our buildings | Innovation

Mary Clark, CMO, Synchronoss Technologies tells TechRepublic’s Teena Maddox about the symbiotic relationship between 5G connectivity and the growth of smart cities and smart buildings.

Mary Clark: Smart cities is I think is going to end up being the embodiment of how 5G starts in many respects. I think the … smart cities has been something that we’ve had test cities after test cities after test cities for the last several years, right? As we think about how that ultimately comes together, when you start to bring together the low latency and the ubiquitous and the promise of those and the increased speed associated with 5G, and then you consider, okay, then the connectivity that end up occurring between the smart cities and the intelligent transportation and ultimately the way in which the fabric of the city itself is woven together because of the connectivity that 5G is providing.

It is, it’s going to finally I think, become much more mainstream. We’re going to see it become a part of our lives. I think it’s been still so tentative; still so nascent in it’s implementation until, really, it’s going to take awhile still. And so, we’re very excited about some of the work that we’ve been doing and finding where are those places that we know that can deliver pretty big bang for the buck here in terms of how do you get started?

So, in smart cities we’re very focused on buildings right now. The opportunity to take a smart building and weave it into the way in which an entire city is maintained and managed and how that interacts with a citizen’s life and they’re going to work. They’re going to and from. They’re hanging out in that building. Hundreds of thousands of people over a large city, how does that, the implementation, really, of the smart building, provide a new way for managing energy consumption? Changing the way in which the footprint of the consumption of the entire city changes.

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So, as you start to build the stack inside of the building and you start to draw down that consumption and you start to change the way in which the human interacts with the building in and of itself and how that building interacts with the rest of the buildings in the city. You start to see this change in the way in which the sustainability, for example, inside of a city, is being maintained.

A smart city has a lot of promise to it, but I think we’ve got a little bit of a journey ahead of us and we believe that smart city is really going to start with smart building, and that’s ultimately going to manifest itself into the way in which 5G is implemented.

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