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Powering the Internet of Everything

Cities around the world have set their digital transformation sights on uplifting healthcare, education and delivering quality utility and transport services while also prioritising public safety.

Fred Saayman

Fred Saayman, business unit executive at Pinnacle, authorised distributor of Huawei Technologies Enterprise products in South Africa and Africa, says, “In the past two years alone Huawei has helped seven cities win international smart city awards, so the company is well positioned to assist South African cities to achieve their digital transformation goals. The Huawei Smart City Solution is comprised of new information and communications technologies aimed at building a smart city nervous system with all things sensing, connected, and intelligent,” he says.

Big data management and analysis is accommodated on the FusionInsight platform with ubiquitous connections and numerous sensors. “Smart Streetlight – ideal for energy saving city construction – is just one of the advantages of this solution. For example in the city of Weifang in China, more than 40 000 streetlights have been reconstructed based on the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result, the operations and maintenance (O&M) efficiency has improved by 45%, the lighting rate has increased by 25% and the annual electricity consumption has been reduced by 6.8 million kWh. In a South Africa constantly challenged by an energy crisis, this solution holds immense promise for the conservation of power and better service delivery through enhanced O&M.”

Smart parking delivers brand-new parking services to inner city areas by accurately and quickly detecting parking space occupation status. “Smart water gives a real-time full picture of the city lifeline. Again in Weifang, the ‘smart river chief’ solution – based on eLTE – is recording the state and quality of water in real time.”

Saayman notes the key success factors for smart city construction include breaking data silos and restructuring processes, strong execution teams with high level planning, coordinated construction and iterative evolution. “Huawei has experience in all aspects of smart city planning; consultation; project management; engineering services and implementation. This experience also extends to smart campuses which play an important role in people’s work and life.”

By leveraging emerging ICT technologies, such as cloud computing, IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence, Huawei’s Smart Campus Solution addresses challenges to traditional campuses including: low management efficiency, poor service experience, serious energy waste, weak security and high operational costs. “The solution implements digital transformation of campuses; it fuels innovative industry development, and enhances service experience.

“Huawei is committed to building the Digital Enablement Platform, redefining the campus service architecture. This platform is compatible with various terminals and supports diverse applications to integrate data, visualise the campus status, manage all services, and control events. By constructing secure, comfortable, efficient, green, and smart campuses, the solution provides better service experiences for campus users and operational excellence for campus operators, thereby unleashing more business and social benefits,” concludes Saayman.

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