At Mobile World Congress this year, we spoke with Mr. Hudson Lou, Director of Network and Services Development of Macau CTM, to discuss Macau’s digitalization journey and the potential of 5.5G
Macau occupies a relatively unique position within the global telecoms market, being one of the few cities in the world to have full coverage of both fiber and 5G. Combining this with the city’s high rate of technology adoption, it is easy to see why Macau has quickly become a hotbed of advanced 5G use cases and is well on its way to becoming a truly smart city.
The pandemic made mobile payments commonplace, but the Government was able to understand the trends and intervened decisively
It is true that Macau had been adopting mobile payments for at least three years before the pandemic hit, but everyone in the city knows how it was before and how it is now.
Many steps have been taken, but there is a problem that is limiting the development of the project.
Technology is now at the forefront of the Macau government’s priorities, but the concept of a smart city, which is now one of the watchwords, appeared for the first time in the Policy Address for 2016.
It all started exactly two decades ago, but only in the last few years has the e-government formula developed. Much is done, much remains to be done
Japan’s Waseda University, in cooperation with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference (APEC) from 2005-2021, has been publishing the annual “Global E-Government Ranking” report, which counts the e-government scores of various governments.
Read more: E-government: all chips in the ‘Macau One Account’
Despite the government’s moves and pledges in recent years, there’s still a lot of room for improvement in expediting the digital development of Macau and transforming the territory into a smart city – from better formulation of a blueprint, infrastructure updates, to cultivation of local talents and stakeholders.
Technology has been fully integrated in our daily life, particularly in the past two years in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We can settle our transactions with e-wallets now, make online applications at different public entities, check the real-time location of buses across the territory via mobile app, etc. These all have been partially facilitated by the government’s push to transform Macau into a smart city — but observers believe much more should be done to fulfil this “smart” vision.