Dorset will be at the forefront of a ‘5G connectivity revolution’ as a project has been backed by government funding.
The smart place pilot project has been allocated £1million by Dorset LEP from the government’s local growth fund to BCP Council, who have increased the funding to £1.3million.
Befor Covid-19, the Scottish Government was active in fostering existing and new relationships with our Nordic and Baltic neighbours. Now that the world has been turned upside down by the horror of this pandemic, connections with these smaller northern nations seem all the more important in terms of what we can learn from their individual responses to the crisis.
Estonia is a case in point, a small nation state with a population of 1.3million, with one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU and one of the highest standards of living in the world. This success is in no small part due to its digitisation and e-governance revolution since becoming independent in the 1990s, adding leading digital nation status to its many accolades.
Read more: GB: Agenda: We should follow Estonia’s lead in the digital revolution
As communications networks expand and the built environment becomes intelligent, how will smart cities provide new ways of living and working?
While the smart city has been developing for decades, it’s only recently that it has started to come into its own. Pervasive connectivity, where every object in the built environment has intelligence and – more crucially – can ‘talk’ to each other, is about to see massive expansion. The twin technologies of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) will deliver cities that are live environments we can all move through, where every aspect of city life is impacted by high-speed data connectivity.
Sunderland City Council is celebrating the announcement of not one, but two nominations for digital leadership and city-wide digital transformation, placing Sunderland firmly in the top ten leading smart cities across the UK.
Already confirmed as one of the Digital Leaders 100 (DL100) List, today’s shortlist nomination means that Sunderland City Council’s Chief Executive, Patrick Melia, has made it into the top 10 in the Digital Leader of the Year 2020 category, and the city has been shortlisted for Smart City of the Year 2020.
Read more: GB: Tyne and Wear: National recognition for Sunderland’s digital transformation
Cisco’s UK smart city chief blasts those “patting themselves on the back” for releasing messy data
The promise of ‘smart communities’ powered by intermingling technologies hasn’t come to fruition due to the awful and fragmented nature of data at disposal to developers, according to Cisco's IoT chief.
Stu Higgins, head of smart cities and IoT for the UK public sector, argued this week that while data might be more freely available than ever before, the data itself is in a poor condition and might not be in the right state to be taken advantage by computers and algorithms.