A new Ovum report outlines a path forward for government agencies to take advantage of the Internet of Things.
According to the report, the Internet of Things (IoT) has already impacted the way that urban residents use public transportation. This is in keeping with Ovum’s projection that the largest impact of IoT on government agencies will be deployments in cities and urban areas.
Next up is smart grids—where the utility is publicly owned—and smart buildings. (There are over 2,000 publicly owned electricity providers in the United States according to the American Public Power Association.)
Smart lighting for energy efficiency is usually a smart city starting point. Ovum encourages cities to leverage smart light poles and utility poles as platforms for connecting Internet of Things devices; the existing infrastructure is largely already in place.
Glasgow has already rolled out intelligent street lighting as part of its future cities program. Energy efficiency is just one goal of the program—air pollution detection, traffic flow monitoring and street disturbance detection are additional benefits.
Smart city projects are the vanguard of Internet of Things for government, Ovum says. This includes applications like smart ticketing for public transportation. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, over 20 agencies participate in the Clipper smart payment system, which has over 1.4 million cards in circulation and is used for more than 700,000 trips per day.
All-in-all, smart city technology through the Internet of Things is poised to be a major part of government energy and transportation policy.
Ovum’s full report is available online.
