IoT and the Smart City: From Waste Disposal to Traffic Easing

The concept of a “smart city” sounds impossibly futuristic, conjuring images of sci-fi utopias and flying cars. In reality, smart technology is a widespread feature of urban life, and has been for years. The term refers to any urban area that utilizes connected devices, particularly the Internet of Things (IoT), to enhance public services and infrastructure. A smart city doesn’t need to be a new project: Rome, Beijing, and London are all smart cities.

Like a smart home, a smart city incorporates a collection of devices and tools that communicate wirelessly with each other. In a smart home, this may mean a lamp that automatically turns on when the owners return. In smart cities, this principle is extended to traffic, sewage, lighting, and waste management infrastructure. 

From Copenhagen to Cape Town, urban planners have leveraged wireless technology and telecommunications to enhance the urban experience. This global development has been made possible by the rapidly growing IoT sector.

How IoT is reshaping city life

The IoT industry is fundamental to the evolution of smart cities. The Internet of Things encompasses any and all devices that share a wireless connection (also known as OTA, or over-the-air communication). This can be via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or a cellular data connection. State-run measures, like smart water meters, as well as private companies that impact city life, like car-sharing services, all fall under the umbrella of IoT smart city solutions.

The IoT revolution

While connected devices have been a part of urban planning for years, advancements in eSIM technology and 5G networks have encouraged a recent rapid rise in the IoT industry. By 2028, the IoT market is estimated to be worth over $1.75 trillion, while the number of connected devices is set to grow exponentially.  

Cities and individuals must prepare for this sharp rise in cellular data usage and harness the opportunities it provides to implement wireless infrastructure services.

By partnering with a leading IoT partner like 1GLOBAL, organizations can connect devices across the globe with a single low-latency core network.

IoT in action: 5 smart cities

As an emerging technology with a near-limitless range of uses, IoT networks in smart cities are constantly evolving. Some have near-universal appeal, while others are niche cases addressing local challenges. Here is a selection of some notable current applications of IoT smart city infrastructure: 

1. Barcelona: easing congestion with smart traffic lights

In 2012, Barcelona launched its smart city initiative, announcing a plan to install IoT sensors and connected devices across thousands of locations to assist with water, waste, traffic, and energy management. The Catalan capital’s history of municipal tech innovations also includes installing Spain’s largest public Wi-Fi network and city-wide fiber-optic cables to serve 90% of its residents.

A celebrated example is the city’s connected traffic light system, which uses real-time traffic analysis to consistently schedule green lights for emergency vehicles. City-wide sensors and automated lights maintain an optimal traffic flow while delivering a clear path for emergency responders when required.

This is part of a wider new traffic management strategy, which uses IoT sensors and AI algorithms to ease congestion and improve road safety throughout Barcelona. Essential services like directing traffic require a truly failproof cellular connection. A fully geo-redundant, low-latency IoT network, like that offered by 1GLOBAL, is essential to delivering safe and viable urban IoT solutions.

2. Cape Town: combating drought with IoT-powered water management

With long, hot summers and a rising population, water preservation is an essential facet of Cape Town’s urban planning. Maintaining sufficient water levels and ensuring equal distribution during periods of drought is a perpetual task in subtropical cities. As the climate crisis and global temperature increases continue to disproportionately affect tropical and subtropical regions like the Western Cape, this need will only become more urgent.

In Cape Town, an unprecedented three-year drought between 2015 and 2018 drove the city to develop a more sustainable water conservation strategy.

As well as social measures like household usage limits and hosepipe bans, the city implemented a range of technological solutions to address current and future water shortages. Leaking pipes were identified and fixed, and over 20,000 broken water meters were substituted with smart replacements. The University of Cape Town developed a series of new water flow sensors and a smart water management roadmap in direct response to these shortages. These IoT meters provide a new level of accuracy and real-time insights into the region’s water levels, laying the groundwork for a sustainable approach to water management in the face of ongoing climate change.

This range of measures has already proven its worth: between the drought years of 2015-2018, Capetonian households reduced their overall water consumption by 50%.

3. Seoul: tackling food waste with the Internet of Things

In a densely populated city like the South Korea capital Seoul, waste reduction is essential to maintaining high living standards. To combat avoidable food waste and the associated greenhouse gas emissions, Seoul introduced an initially controversial — but thoroughly effective — IoT solution.

In 2012, households in Seoul received new bins with built-in RFID sensors. The homeowner uses a dedicated contactless card to open their household’s bin and dispose of food. The receptacles then measure the volume of food waste deposited and charge the owner accordingly. This fleet of IoT devices simultaneously provides the city with in-depth data on waste patterns and metrics, allowing it to offer more accurate solutions and optimize the routes and timings of waste disposal teams.

Forming part of a wider waste-reduction strategy, Seoul’s smart bins had eliminated thousands of tons of biodegradable waste by 2019, saving the city an estimated $8.4 million in collection and disposal fees. Today, South Korea recycles 95% of its food waste — a 93% increase since 1995.

4. Copenhagen: smart street lighting cuts energy consumption

Copenhagen is one of the most environmentally-friendly cities on Earth. While the Danish capital's goal of becoming completely carbon neutral by 2025 has yet to materialize, it continues to invest heavily in low-emission urban design, much of it based on smart city principles and IoT networks. One key to achieving carbon neutrality is managing the energy consumption of municipal infrastructure. Consuming around 40% of the city’s energy requirements, Copenhagen’s street lighting system was identified as a major target for improvement.

Hardware measures like low-energy LED bulbs were combined with cutting-edge IoT technology to minimize electricity requirements while delivering a consistently high level of safe, functional, and attractive urban lighting.

Copenhagen’s connected streetlights rely on a vast fleet of IoT sensors to provide a constant stream of real-time traffic and pedestrian data to alter their light output as required. At busier times, more light is produced, and energy is saved when no nearby pedestrians, cycles, or vehicles are present.

5. Singapore: the Smart Nation project

The Asian city-state of Singapore's status as an independent nation has allowed it to develop advanced smart city technologies that benefit the entire population.

Singapore is widely regarded as one of the world’s most technologically advanced cities and an example of how IoT can be implemented into urban planning. Singapore currently employs a wide range of connected devices, both governmental and third-party, to deliver a higher quality of life to residents. From air-purity sensors to real-time traffic monitoring, IoT fleets are deployed across the city and deliver constant insights to city planners. Future-forward solutions, such as issuing wearable IoT health sensors to monitor patients remotely and ease pressure on municipal healthcare services, have since been adopted by other cities around the world. This dense network of urban IoT usage is part of Singapore’s Smart Nation project, aimed at delivering a sustainable future with minimal carbon emissions and a high quality of life.

A recent example is the under-construction suburb of Tengah, which promises IoT integration in services like automated recycling bins, a municipal cooling system, and the prioritization of pedestrians and bikes over cars.

The future of IoT cities

As the climate crisis worsens, cities must act urgently to implement smart solutions and maintain viable infrastructure. Emerging technologies like eSIMs and Remote SIM Provisioning (RSP) allow organizations to deploy and monitor connected devices at unprecedented scale and short notice.

This has opened the door to new and larger urban IoT networks. Nevertheless, security and privacy concerns remain. Large-scale deployments of recording devices in public spaces raise questions about surveillance and privacy. Any city-wide IoT connection overseeing services as vital as water, sewage, or traffic management must be safeguarded against network outages and exhibit consistently low latency. Implementing such a new technology requires an expert partner.

1GLOBAL IoT

As a truly global company with years of IoT experience, 1GLOBAL is an industry-leading IoT partner in both the eSIM and physical SIM spaces.

Since 2018, we’ve helped dozens of multinational enterprises and organizations undergo digital transformations and develop sustainable, scalable, IoT infrastructures that prepare them for the ongoing acceleration of worldwide connected device usage.

While the IoT space is poised for continuous growth, IoT companies and cities require scalable solutions that can adapt to this growth without compromising on security, connection quality, or personalized service.

1GLOBAL IoT solutions are specifically designed for scalable, multinational use cases. With a globally redundant core network, a dedicated multilingual service team, and full SGP.32 support, 1GLOBAL IoT has a track record of delivering secure IoT services and connecting device fleets for global enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses. Contact our team directly to learn more about how 1GLOBAL IoT services can benefit your company.