Many organizations involved in smart services are privately owned and use their own proprietary service platforms. This approach tends to discourage competition for more cost-effective services.These complexities mean we are at risk of a smart cities stalemate, with potential technological or monetary barriers rendering services inaccessible for residents.
First of all, we need to have standards. The next step is to have these standards interoperable.
We remember those early days of mobile phones. Every supplier had its own tech and joining with other suppliers in creating standards. We had GSM, TDMA, CDMA to mention a few, and they were all incompatible. You couldn’t bring a phone on a trip since it just didn’t work in another country. In the end, GSM ate them all. Without interoperability, you will have fierce competition to the death. And to a huge cost. All phones had to be replaced to the winning standard, all losing networks had to be replaced.
Open standards with interoperability with “fellow standards” and legacy technologies are the way forward for a future proof smart city.
Or anything IoT for that matter.
