Ericsson 5G Radios for Urban Locations

Spreading 5G Radio in Urban Deployments 

New Ericsson street solutions equip busy urban locations with low-visibility, high-performance 5G radios

PLANO, Texas, Aug. 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) is expanding its portfolio of 5G radios with three new offerings geared toward urban environments. Part of Ericsson Street Solutions, these radios will allow communications service providers (CSPs) to build robust 5G service across all bands in urban environments while blending in seamlessly with the cityscapes.

“Urban deployments are critical for reaching the full potential of 5G,” said Kevin Zvokel, Head of Networks for Ericsson North America. “We know CSPs are looking for ways to deploy quickly and with simplicity, maximizing the 5G user experience while leveraging minimally intrusive equipment. Ericsson’s solutions do just this and can bring a complete 5G network to life across all bands.”  ... ' 

Electrified Urban Transport

Recall we experimented with Segways in our innovation center,  and observed them being used in locations like the grocery store 'Jungle Jims'.      Here more about typical  human transportation. But do consider that we now expect to be able to carry things with us as well.

SEGWAYS, SCOOTERS, AND SKATEBOARDS: THE NEW ELECTRIFIED URBAN TRANSPORTATION  from Boundmotor.com

March 31, 2021

When Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine” in January 1886, he ignited what would later become a revolution in transportation. Over the centuries, improvements would be made to Benz’s idea, which ultimately led to making privately owned cars and large-scale projects like buses and subway systems central to urban mobility. Popular as they are, the traditional modes of public transportation like privately owned cars, public buses, and subways have their challenges. They are expensive to establish and maintain, result in gridlocks, pollution, and a shortage of parking in most major cities. Within the context of the challenges related to traditional forms of mass transportation, the Segway’s introduction in 2001 started a trend of replacing large-scale public infrastructure with small, one-person electric vehicles. McKinsey & Company, the management consultancy firm, calls this type of transportation micromobility. This article looks at the evolution of one-person electric modes of transport and how they have impacted urban transportation. We start by focusing on the urban transport challenges that have made one-person electric vehicles a growing urban transit option. We then look into the history of these forms of transport and some safety tips for people using them.

CHALLENGES OF TRADITIONAL PUBLIC AND PRIVATE URBAN TRANSPORTATION

The challenges associated with extensive public transportation projects are well documented. An article published by Australia’s University of Melbourne puts these challenges into perspective. It says, “Chronic losses of life on roadways, dangerous deterioration in air quality, and worldwide accumulation of atmospheric carbon can no longer resist the challenges of an increased population and its urbanization.” These challenges are partly responsible for the increasing trend where people prefer to use one-person electric vehicles.  ... "    (Much more) 

Israeli Military Launches Radical New Google Maps Alternative

New approaches at detailed street maps.

Israeli Military Launches Radical New Google Maps Alternative
Forbes
Zak Doffman
June 30, 2020

The Israeli military has adopted artificial intelligence (AI), multi-source data fusion, and augmented reality (AR) to weed out terrorists from civilians in urban areas. Similar to Google Street View, the military is using an AR overlay from the fusion of multiple sources of highly classified intelligence and open source data on the terrain and environment, along with AI running pattern analytics from previous combat experiences to gauge the hidden enemy's next move. The AR display, which is shown to soldiers on a smartphone or tablet or streamed directly into their binoculars or weapons sights, helps them understand why a location has been deemed hostile. Final targeting decisions are left to the soldiers on the ground. The AI tool is tasked with distilling terabytes of intelligence every day into useful and relevant data, and soldiers have just five to 10 seconds to decide on any action they take based on that data.  ..."

Street Lamps as a Platform for the Urban Smart City

Considerable piece on using Street lights as a platform for the urban smart city.  Have seen this posed a number of times, greet place to start, how often has it been successfully done?

Street Lamps as a Platform
By Max Mühlhäuser, Christian Meurisch, Michael Stein, Jörg Daubert, Julius Von Willich, Jan Riemann, Lin Wang
Communications of the ACM, June 2020, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 75-83
10.1145/3376900

Street lamps constitute the densest electrically operated public infrastructure in urban areas. Their changeover to energy-friendly LED light quickly amortizes and is increasingly leveraged for smart city projects, where LED street lamps double, for example, as wireless networking or sensor infrastructure. We make the case for a new paradigm called SLaaP—street lamps as a platform. SLaaP denotes a considerably more dramatic changeover, turning urban light poles into a versatile computational infrastructure. SLaaP is proposed as an open, enabling platform, fostering innovative citywide services for the full range of stakeholders and end users—seamlessly extending from everyday use to emergency response. In this article, we first describe the role and potential of street lamps and introduce one novel base service as a running example. We then discuss citywide infrastructure design and operation, followed by addressing the major layers of a SLaaP infrastructure: hardware, distributed software platform, base services, value-added services and applications for users and 'things.' Finally, we discuss the crucial roles and participation of major stakeholders: citizens, city, government, and economy.

Recent years have seen the emergence of smart street lamps, with very different meanings of 'smart'—sometimes related to the original purpose as with usage-dependent lighting, but mostly as add-on capabilities like urban sensing, monitoring, digital signage, WiFi access, or e-vehicle charging.a Research about their use in settings for edge computing14 or car-to-infrastructure communication (for example, traffic control, hazard warnings, or autonomous driving)6 hints at their great potential as computing resources. The future holds even more use cases: for example, after a first wave of 5G mobile network rollouts from 2020 onward, a second wave shall apply mm-wave frequencies for which densely deployed light poles can be appropriate 'cell towers.'

Street lamps: A (potential) true infrastructure. Given the huge potential of street lamps evident already today and given the broad spectrum of use cases, a city's street lamps may obviously constitute a veritable infrastructure. However, cities today do not consider street lamps—beyond the lighting function—as an infrastructure in the strict sense. Like road, water, energy, or telecommunication, infrastructures constitute a sovereign duty: provision and appropriate public access must be regulated, design and operation must balance stakeholder interests, careful planning has to take into account present and future use cases and demands, maintenance, threat protection, and more. Well-considered outsourcing or privatization may be aligned with these public interests.

The LED dividend: A unique opportunity. The widespread lack of such considerations in cities is even more dramatic since a once-in-history opportunity opens up with the changeover to energy efficient LED lighting, expected to save large cities millions in terms of energy cost, as we will discuss, called 'LED dividend' in the following. Given their notoriously tight budgets, cities urgently need to dedicate these savings if they want to 'own' and control an infrastructure, which, once built, can foster innovation and assure royalties and new business as sources of city and citizen prosperity ... "

Digital Twins for Urban Planning

Reminds me of the urban/city planning games like SimCity.   And then also the Agent Models we used to construct simulations of very complex country spaces.  The Digital Twin idea allows us to further specify the details of the participants,  which was hard in the past methods.   But are we aiming to optimize or just explore?

Digital Twins Give Urban Planners Virtual Edge
By Financial Times in CACM

Showing the interrelationships of municipal activities and the data they generate.
Digital twins give a city's planners, policymakers, resource managers, asset owners, and  
Digital twins—virtual simulations of cities—give urban planners, policymakers, resource managers, asset owners, and citizens the advantage of more dynamic tools and information, which can benefit new construction and traffic management, and provide tools for residents to explore the effects of planned projects.

One example is Glasgow, Scotland's Future City project: the initiative's tools offer citizen-accessible data on sustainability overlaid on interactive maps, customized dashboards with widgets on environmental conditions, and data on seasonal food availability.

Meanwhile, Cambridge University's National Digital Twin Project created a U.K. network of city-scale digital twins, with guiding principles that prioritize trust, transparency, social value, ownership, responsibility, and security.

Neil Thompson at engineering company Atkins Global said, "Digital twins offer new opportunities for sustainability and wellbeing—from a physical and a psychological perspective." ..... "

Context in Satellite Imagery

Nathan in Flowingdata shows a different kind of data imagery.    Advanced Sat imagery handles this today, but recall doing it for forestry assets before that was common.   Makes you think about context once again.  Link through for more details.

SimCity-like views using satellite imagery   By Nathan Yau

Maps typically show a view from straight above, which is good for navigation and to see regional patterns over large areas. However, missing out on the extra dimension of height can mean missing out on context. Robert Simmon for Planet Labs shows off some work in getting the less abstract perspective at a large scale.  ... " 

The Future of AI in the Home, Office and City

An area we covered for years.  How AI will influence will our home, business and urban worlds by 2030?

Stanford-Hosted Study Examines How AI Might Affect Urban Life in 2030 Stanford News (09/01/16) Tom Abate 

A year-long, Stanford University-hosted study projects how artificial intelligence (AI) will realistically impact North American urban life in eight domains by 2030. Stanford's One Hundred Year Study on AI (AI100) is the result of a standing committee of researchers enlisted to evaluate the technological, economic, and policy ramifications of potential AI applications in a societally relevant environment. Five sections of the new report focus on application areas such as transportation, home/service robots, healthcare, education, and entertainment. The three other sections concentrate on technological effects in domains such as low-resource communities, public safety and security, and employment and the workplace. The AI100 panel says the study seeks to guide ethical development of AI technologies via public discourse. "It is not too soon for social debate on how the fruits of an AI-dominated economy should be shared," the report's authors note. AI100 standing committee chair Barbara Grosz, recipient of the 2009 ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award, says AI technologies can be reliable and yield a wide spectrum of benefits. "Being transparent about their design and deployment challenges will build trust and avert unjustified fear and suspicion," she notes. .... " 

Inferring Traffic Patterns for Graph Analytics

I can see this kind of pattern recognition more broadly used, and linked not only to maps but also to network patterns for graph analytics.

Inferring urban travel patterns from cellphone data
Big-data analysis could give city planners timelier, more accurate alternatives to commuter surveys.
by Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office

In making decisions about infrastructure development and resource allocation, city planners rely on models of how people move through their cities, on foot, in cars, and on public transportation. Those models are largely based on surveys of residents’ travel habits.

But conducting surveys and analyzing their results is costly and time consuming: A city might go more than a decade between surveys. And even a broad survey will cover only a tiny fraction of a city’s population.

In the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from MIT and Ford Motor Company describe a new computational system that uses cellphone location data to infer urban mobility patterns. Applying the system to six weeks of data from residents of the Boston area, the researchers were able to quickly assemble the kind of model of urban mobility patterns that typically takes years to build.

The system holds the promise of not only more accurate and timely data about urban mobility but the ability to quickly determine whether particular attempts to address cities’ transportation needs are working.  .... " 

IFTF Writes A Handbook for the Maker City

I note that the Institute for the Future: IFTF, a nonprofit company I worked with for years, wrote for as well, has a Maker City Project underway.   They are publishing a handbook on the topic chapter by chapter.   The aim is to create urban revitalization using a combination of 'maker' mentality and technology.  You can see the some of the usual cities mentioned, but also many medium sized cities.

  See the free handbook here, now up to chapter 5, with quite a lot of detail.  A little too much expectation that you can regulate and influence all the things involved.  Too many west coast reasons.   Interesting read.  Will try to follow.

Playful City Designs

Not only practical design, but how about playful design?  Here a UK effort on the idea.  Not gamification dynamics in the sense of competition, but promoting curiosity and even innovation. Too often forgotten.   Also with a strong element of cognitive language interaction. " ... Hello Lamp Post and the idea of playful cities ...  A new project that allows city dwellers to converse with urban objects begins in Bristol this July. We speak to the creators about this fascinating collision of Smart Cities and location-based gaming  ... " 

Kroger Urban Stores

In WCPO: Would think there would be more opportunities to make smaller footprint urban stores more profitable with smart interactions with the consumer.

Urban World App Examined

Came upon the visually impressive Urban World App by McKinsey.   Free and readily downloadable for IOS or Android. The front end interface is a globe you can move around and zoom into.   You can access a large economic database by city, population segment,  study year, and region/city locations.  You can also compare regions in 2010 or 2025.   Another interface lets you look at GDP and economic center of gravity as it changed from early history to 2025.  Easy to use and impressive on a tablet.

I liked the design.  Attractive.  Comparisions can be done readily between locations.  The use of the pie chart format made it difficult to do segment comparisons.  Though it would not have looked as sexy, a set of simple bar charts would have been clearer.  You can share any displays you create, which I did on Twitter.  I have not explored it, but I assume the data is downloadable to other visualization engines?  Perhaps not, it is described as proprietary.

Well worth taking a look at.  Free, and you can be exploring in a few minutes.  Hope they continue creating other data examination tools based on this one.  A standard of visual interaction would be useful for enterprise economists.  They write:

" ... The growth of cities in emerging markets is driving the most significant economic transformation in history. The McKinsey Global Institute’s first ever app, Urban World, offers a sense of how economic power will move as this urban expansion takes place. Now available for iPad, iPhone, and Android, the app offers previously unavailable data from a proprietary MGI database of more than 2,600 cities around the world.

The app also places urbanization in a historical context, using a view from space of the global nighttime distribution of light as a proxy for the global distribution of economic activity. Users can visualize the world’s shifting center of economic gravity during the past two millennia, to 2025. The app serves a purpose similar to a 16th-century map—a rough but helpful tool to help navigate the evolving urban world. ... " 

Shifting Urban Landscape Report

Most interesting and timely report from McKinsey: Urban world: The shifting global business landscape.  With lots of interesting graphics and statistics.

" ... Emerging markets are changing where and how the world does business. For the last three decades, they have been a source of low-cost but increasingly skilled labor. Their fast-growing cities are filled with millions of new and increasingly prosperous consumers, who provide a new growth market for global corporations at a time when much of the developed world faces slower growth as a result of aging. But the number of large companies from the emerging world will rise, as well, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). This powerful wave of new companies could profoundly alter long-established competitive dynamics around the world. ... " 

London Recycling Bins are Following You

I have a recycling bin.  It sits out at the curb once a week.  When I saw this piece that was what I was thinking of.  My bin tracking my recycling.  Very different here.  A piece of urban infrastructure to follow you via your cellphone.  London was an early implementer of camera monitoring, so perhaps not surprising.   Update:  The system test has been stopped due to privacy concerns.

Peapod and Virtual Event Shopping

Peapod's use of lunch truck style vehicles to sell items at events.   The approach also reminds me ot the Schwan's model in suburban communities.   We experimented with the Peapod delivery method.  Note the mobile billboard aspect of the idea as well.   " ... Online grocer Peapod, based here, is launching a promotional campaign featuring “mobile billboards” on the sides of delivery trucks where consumers can shop for groceries using their smartphones. The trucks will be featured at summer gathering places such as ballparks and concert venues in Peapod’s markets along the East Coast, where it supplies the Giant and Stop & Shop banners of parent company Ahold USA, and in Chicago. The campaign also features coffee-cup sleeves with scanable product, in addition to the mobile billboards. ... " 

Urban Mobility Innovation

A topic of particular interest, special report:

Next Stop, Innovation: What’s Ahead for Urban Mobility? 

Transportation in the 21st century is entering a robust phase that mirrors the early years of the automobile, when gasoline, steam and electric technology vied for market share. Today, urban transit is making a comeback, as is the electric car. Congested highways still face emission concerns, but consumers now often have the choice of light and heavy rail. Car sharing, which began as a European phenomenon, has prospered in U.S. urban centers, along with bicycle sharing, vanpooling and other options. This special report, produced in coordination with Wharton’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership (IGEL), explores how cities are expanding their options for cleaner transportation, and how new technologies, innovations and incentives are revitalizing the sector.

Zipcar as an Acquired Innovation Idea

Innovation Excellence writes about the acquisition of Zipcar by Avis.  Zipcar is the urban car sharing service, which we looked at as an example of the innovation process.    Saul Kaplan writes to Avis:  " ... If you want to win big with the Zipcar acquisition you will have to try harder. Resist the temptation to impose your core car rental business model on the upstart transformer. Zipcar is your sandbox to scale a car-sharing model with potential to disrupt the automotive and car rental industry. Stop with the number two shtick, Zipcar can help Avis become a market maker instead of a share taker..... " 

Junaio Augmented Reality Update

Junaio has updated their mobile App capabilities for commercial augmented reality.  Full report accessible here.  Also see a short video explaining mobile augmented reality.  New capabilities include scanning images, barcodes and QR codes.    With an easier to use interface.  I like the idea, but it depends heavily on accessible content, and there isn't much available in my suburban location. Even the Web was not impressive until you had sufficient value to search for.

Wal-Mart and P&G Team for Mobile Shopping

In a unique and novel approach a faux food truck in NYC and Chicago is decorated with QR codes.  Allows the walking shopper to buy an assortment of popular consumer package goods.  Similar to some of the virtual stores reported on here lately in transit passageways. " ... giving residents an opportunity to scan QR codes with their mobile phones to order P&G products from Wal-Mart Stores. Similar QR codes will be on display at bus shelters in Chicago. "People have yet to really adopt buying consumables online," said P&G spokesman Tim Marrin. "We think having free delivery, and getting this message out to urban shoppers who don't have access to Wal-Mart stores, is a great first start."... "
And more from AdAge.

3D Vision Allows Group Drone Flying

From the Fraunhofer Institute:    In continued development of advanced imaging and control, this development is added to the broader development of drone sensors.  Multiple, simple even disposable drones,  could be a novel solution to sensor problems.  We may live in a different world then.

" ... They can be deployed as additional surveillance resources during major events, or as high-resolution 3D street imaging systems. Intelligent swarms of aerial drones are a universally useful tool for police, crisis managers and urban planners. Special 3D sensors developed by Fraunhofer researchers ensure fl awless aerobatics and prevent collisions. ... "