Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

It is a provocative vision, this city of screens. For China, surely, but for the rest of us as well. In America it could mean rewiring our sprawling suburbs, saving energy and reducing traffic by replacing car trips with video calls. If this future catches on, hooking up cities for mass video communications could power Cisco’s profits for years to come. It’s a well-worn cliche that the only people who get rich in a gold rush are the ones selling picks and shovels. But beyond just peddling tools and equipment, if Cisco’s network becomes a true “fourth utility,” all bets are off.

Hints of the potential are emerging in Songdo, where the company will install ten thousand TelePresence screens in homes, offices, and schools by 2018. The screens come included with new apartments, and unlimited video calls will cost just $10 per month. But Songdo U.Life—a new joint venture between Cisco, the developer Gale International, and Korean tech giant LG—will also launch a kind of app store, where residents can subscribe to a whole host of new interactive video. As Eliza Strickland

reported in IEEE Spectrum , “a resident could start her day with a live yoga class; later her child could get one-on-one English lessons from a teacher across the world.”

Much like Apple’s App Store, U.Life and Cisco will exact a healthy vigorish from service providers who want to plug in to its hi-def grid.

Over the last decade, Cisco’s fortunes have whipsawed between growth and collapse, first riding the telecom bubble of the late 1990s to near-oblivion in 2000, and then slowly tracking the broadband expansion of the next decade back to stability. Today, facing a future of intense competition from China’s Huawei, Cisco is taking the boldest bet on smart cities of any technology giant. Alone among them, it challenges us to radically rethink how we build and live in them. One of the company’s ads in The Economist magazine that featured the skyline of Beijing imprudently asks, “Is this really the end of cities as we know them?” The answer, a punt: “Check back in 20 years.”

Untethered

For the last thirty years, the Internet has been a thing that we “dial up” to or “jack into.” While cyberspace was an ethereal place, the process of getting there meant

making a very real and direct physical connection. That’s no longer the case. We’ve untethered ourselves from the Internet’s wired backbone: our dealings with it now are almost exclusively via radio waves.The networks that make our mobile connected lives possible are the newest and most crucial infrastructure that will power smart cities. Yet, possibly because they are mostly invisible, we cant seem to figure out what to call them. None of the commonly used monikers quite capture their importance. One can only wonder how long the oddly durable anachronism “wireless” will stick around. “Cellular” (and the even worse “cellular telephony”) is a technicians term, mostly confined to use in the United States, which describes the network’s underlying architecture of towers. It’s like calling the Internet “distributed packet-switched computer networking” instead of the “Web.” “Mobile” starts to get at the essence of why people find these technologies so utterly appealing but misses one big aspect of how we use them. Most of the time we aren’t moving, we’re sitting still.

There is a more fitting adjective that captures both the technology and what it is doing to us. In the 1990s, as the US military contemplated battlefield communications in the future, it adopted the term “untethered.” The idea is apropos. Roaming across the room or across the city, we are, in every sense, free of the cables that once tied us to our desktop. It’s hard to think of a technological revolution that has snuck up on us with such little fanfare. Perhaps that’s because it has been such a long, slow process, moving forward in glacial steps throughout the twentieth century as ways of organizing society and structuring human settlements have evolved.

Mobile radios are now nearly a century old. In 1920, radio enthusiast W. W. Macfarlane demonstrated a setup for two-way communications from a moving vehicle in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. As Smithsonian Magazine recounts it, “With a chauffeur driving him as he sat in the back seat of his moving car he amazed a reporter from The Electrical Experimenter magazine by talking to Mrs. Macfarlane, who sat in their garage 500 yards down the road.”69 The horrors of World War Is trench warfare no doubt in his mind, Macfarlane immediately saw the value of his invention for a mobile military. In a prescient prediction of our modern, networked infantry, he envisioned how “A whole regiment equipped with the telephone receivers, with only their rifles as aerials, could advance a mile and each would be instantly

in touch with the commanding officer. No runners would be needed.” The Second World War would prove Macfarlane right. By 1940 engineers at Motorola had perfected a rugged mobile FM radio transceiver that could be carried in a soldier’s backpack. The original “walkie talkie,” Motorola’s SCR-300, weighed just thirty-five

pounds, and with a ten-mile range was often the only line of communication between field commanders and fast-moving units on the front line.

American servicemen returned home with a deep appreciation for the advantages of mobile communications in combat, and an eagerness to turn this novel technology to commercial purposes. AT&T launched the first US mobile phone network in Saint Louis in 1946 with a single call from a driver in his car. The system was based on technology developed for police use during the preceding decades. In 1928 the Detroit Police Department installed wireless receivers in cruisers, creating the first radio police dispatch system. A simple one-way broadcast, station KOP played music in between official announcements to comply with its federal licensing as an entertainment station (there were no official law-enforcement radio bands at the time). By 1933 two-way radios were developed and quickly deployed nationwide after successful testing by police in Bayonne, New Jersey.

With just a single transmitter for receiving calls, and a handful for the return signals, the primitive radiotelephone system launched in 1946 could handle only three simultaneous calls across an entire city in a party-line arrangement—you had to listen for a clear channel before making a call. By 1948 service had been expanded to over a hundred cities, but with only five thousand subscribers nationwide, it remained a costly luxury for the rich and powerful. An upgrade in 1965 increased capacity to forty thousand subscribers and allowed customers to dial directly rather than use an operator. But scarcity still reigned, and service was rationed by state regulators. Some two thousand subscribers in New York squeezed into just twelve shared channels. The average wait time to make a call was thirty minutes.

Constrained by the need to share airwaves, the mobile telephone’s future seemed limited to a niche. But there was another way to expand; a clever scheme for a high-capacity mobile phone system had moldered in a file cabinet at Bell Labs, AT&T’s research center, since 1947. Instead of using a single transmitter, cities could be divided into a mosaic map of hexagonal zones or “cells.” The precious channels could then be reused in nonadjacent cells without fear of interference. Driving from one side of the city to another, a phone might hop on and off the same frequencies several times. Some fancy engineering was needed to coordinate the handoff between towers, but by the late 1970s new digital switching capabilities in the public telephone network had given the grid enough smarts to handle it. “Cellular telephony,” the awkward moniker loved only by the engineers who coined it, was born. Every time you see a mothlike tangle of wireless antennas sprouting on the roof of a building,that’s the hub of a cell of wireless callers moving through the surrounding area. From that point calls are routed over a “backhaul” wire into the region’s landline grid. As communications scholar George Calhoun puts it in Digital Cellular Radio , the cellular network “is not so much a new technology as a new idea for organizing existing technology on a larger scale.”