It's estimated that, by 2025, more than 60% population will live in urban cities in global and there will have 30+ Mega cities around world. In addition, the urbanization rate in China will be up to 65% by 2020, so there will be 71 million residential citizens living in 667+ domestic cities.
It's quite clear that urbanization as a trend will impact and influence our life style inevitably. With known trends of globalization, smart city become more feasible in different forms around world.
A smart city generally addresses the challenges on the aspects of healthcare, environment, public services, transport, utilities, security etc. However, the roadmap and direction of smart city vary in different contexts. For example, Chinese national strategies of 'one belt and one road' and 'Internet plus' mean differently for related cities because of geographic location, population, economic situation etc.
In addition, when mayors are thinking of smart-city related challenges horizontally, vendors from multiple industries are also developing their solutions vertically, e.g., smart-energy, smart-education, smart-traffic etc. It's obvious that a successful smart city has to be built based on the joint efforts from multiple parties, especially smart-everything vendors who normally own the key resources and cutting-edge technologies.
Smart City 2.0: Concept and vision
The market of smart city will reach about $400 billion by 2020, so it attracts lots of participants from different domains. All participants are contributing their efforts to realize smart city based on different understandings and capabilities. Because of diversified contexts, requests, visions, etc., there are no identical smart city around the world and every smart city has its own features and limitations. According to ZTE's study, most current smart city can be categorized to ‘Smart City 1.0', since these smart cities either only focus on one or several vertical industries but missing global & top-level planning due to constrained collaboration, limited budget and investment, even insufficient resources to continue develop smart city business.
Therefore, ZTE proposes the concept of “Smart City 2.0", which essentially emphasizes the collaboration and governance among the overall eco-system to better address the challenges frustrating industry players in Smart City 1.0 era. In addition, Smart City 2.0 is better to solve the core issues regarding sustainable operation & maintenance, all-inclusive digital-ecosystem, and optimized industry-chain. As a result, it helps to achieve the ultimate goals of smart city, including citizen benefit, scientific administration, industry derivation, etc.
ZTE M-ICT Strategy & ZSmartCity Solution
In order to consolidate 'connection', an important pivot of digital world and smart life, the overall telecom eco-system are working hard. M-ICT is ZTE's strategy to support the connected world of digital business, digitalization of industries, especially the connection requests of “Internet of Things” regarding people, information, machine, place etc.
ZTE has witnessed the industry transformation caused by the digitalization of the industry, most of the government and enterprises will source more solutions and services than traditional hardware and devices from network equipment providers like ZTE, thus, we predict the booming of Smart City demands will be in the next 2 or 3 years. Based on M-ICT strategy and concept of Smart City 2.0, ZTE is ready to meet this disruptive industry changes, and actively contributed to smart city business development and framework standardization through various practices of smart city construction.
ZSmartCity solution is an implementation of M-ICT to chase the dream of 'Smart City 2.0' , and it empowers many leading-edge technologies, including big-data & analytics, cloud computing, open API, tools for eco-system management etc. ZSmartCity as a total solution can cover 10+ vertical industries under a unified global & top-level design. It is awarded by TM Forum for “Open Digital Awards 2014” and “President Award 2015” for its innovative, open and flexible architecture design.
Based on its ZSmartCity solution, ZTE signed a contract with Yinchuan(China) municipal government in December 2014 to implement smart-city. Till now, there are totally 13 subsystems launched, including Smart Government, Smart Transportation, Smart Community, Smart Tourism, etc. Besides 10+ smart city projects in the domestic markets, ZTE have also contributed 100+ smart city projects in 40+ countries, e.g., Laos, Sri Lanka, France, Romania, Turkey, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay, etc. In 2015, ZTE signs a contract with Gujarat (India) to build smart city jointly in India markets.
Collaboration
ZTE has noticed the power of eco-system when constructing Smart-city. So it has been working hard to collaborate with various types of third parties, e.g., enterprise, investor, government, vendor, institute and standard body. TM Forum's first smart-city innovation center in Yinchuan (China) is a very concrete collaboration model of the local municipal government, TM Forum, and ZTE. The goal of this innovation center is to utilize strength of each participants to create a living Smart City Toolkit, Best Practice Guides, Maturity Benchmark, Toolkit and Global Catalog of smart city.
Conclusion & Future work
Smart city is a huge puzzle, and cannot be solved by anyone individually. Therefore, ZTE is always willing to work with partners together to unleash the power of smart city even smart life eventually. A standard smart city should at least cover the aspects of society stability, economy development, and resident benefits. To achieve this goal, we suggest to address the following key points during smart city construction:
- consider technology revolution
- support new business model
- build win-win ecosystem
- optimize infrastructure
- enable management innovation
- focus on industry convergence
By Ms. Jie Chen
*Ms. Jie (Jane) Chen has been Senior Vice President of ZTE since 2002 and is currently in charge of research and development and operations management of the Wire-line Product Division. Meanwhile she is Chairperson of ZTEsoft. Ms. Chen graduated from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 1989 majoring in telecommunications and electronic systems and from the City College of New York State University in 1995 majoring in computer science and technology with a double master’s degrees. Ms. Chen holds the title of senior researcher and senior engineer. Ms. Chen has got 'National Science and Technology Progress Awards' many times for her achievements and contributions in telecommunication industry. Ms. Chen has demonstrated strong research and development capabilities and expertise with many years of managerial experience in both the domestic and international telecommunications industry. Ms. Chen is a Board member of TM Forum to supervise Smart City development.
About ZTE & ZTEsoft
Founded in 1985, ZTE is now listed on both the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. As the largest public-listed telecommunication service vendor in China, ZTE covers every vertical sector including: wireless networks, core networks, access & bearer networks, services and terminals markets. With operations in 160 countries, ZTE has ambitions to achieve the dreams of 'smart everything' based on its capability, strategy, and innovation.
ZTEsoft is a subsidiary of ZTE Corporation to provide ZSmartCity solution. It is a leading provider of telecom software, solutions and services, specializes in providing comprehensive BSS/OSS, Big Data and Managed Service solutions to global operators of wireless, wire-line and broadband cable services. Ultimately, ZTEsoft enables operators to achieve operational agility and deliver innovative services quickly in a challenging and quickly changing market. ZTEsoft‘s ZSmart solutions have been deployed by operators in more than 70 countries worldwide. In order to implement its M-ICT strategy in digital era, ZTE assigns ZTEsoft a new role for smart city construction by taking ZTEsoft's strength of ICT.
