What's your name and what position do you hold?
Colin Barrett, Head of IoT at Vodafone Ireland
What is your professional background?
I joined Vodafone Ireland’s IOT business unit this year from Vodafone’s Cloud & Security division. Prior to Vodafone I held several positions with IBM, Oracle, Siebel and eSpatial in a career focused on software, Cloud, and data centre managed services.
What are your day to day responsibilities?
I am responsible for growing and operating Vodafone’s IOT business in Ireland, including driving our proposition/sales strategy to meet the IOT needs of the Irish enterprise market.
What are the main differences between 4G and 5G technology?
Speed: With 5G we will move from Mbps to Gbps, and we will increase network capacity up to 10x.
Lower latency: This is important for mission critical service. Average end-to-end latency reduces by more than 60%. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) brings IOT applications closer to customers, reducing the latency even further.
Efficiency & Reliability: It provides a better user experience. However, it’s also worth noting it’s more energy efficient. A recent study by Nokia found that 5G networks are up to 90 percent more energy efficient than legacy 4G networks. The rollout of 5G networks is set to increase traffic dramatically making it critical that the energy consumed does not rise at the same rate.
Upping the destiny: With 5G, the number of connections per km2 increases dramatically – as an example, with 4G you could connect 100,000 devices per km2. However, with 5G, you can connect 1,000,000 devices per km2
How will 5G and IoT enable the progression to fully connected cities & towns?
As the density of cities increases, so does congestion, the demand for services and the need for efficient mobility. Connecting cities and towns through 5G networks and IOT can help cities and regions with economic development, efficiency, sustainability and better citizen engagement for large-scale urban change. It can generate the data needed to measure, implement and optimise operations. Whether that’s measuring air quality, traffic flow, planning health services, waste collection, public transport or energy and food waste. These insights can help authorities and policy makers react quicker to changing situations, better use resources and even predict outcomes with data-driven models. For example, public transport vehicles and emergency services could relay information in real time, and data from CCTV footage will improve traffic control.
Can you provide some real-life context of where such value has been implemented?
In Sevilla, we’re already working with the municipal government to monitor a range of services by integrating several data sources and provides analytical capabilities to identify greater efficiency and higher quality services. For example, mobility data is used to adapt lighting needs and citizen mobility data is used to make changes to bus services, making the most of limited public transport resources.
Colin Barrett, Country Manager–IoT, Vodafone will be speaking at the Connected Cities & Towns Virtual Summit on Tuesday 7 December.
For more details visit smartcities.ie