Viewpoint
As the Olympics of the telecom industry, Mobile World Congress brought more than 92,000 people to the city of Barcelona in 2015 and, even on Day One, this year’s event looks set to break that record. For the city itself, the influx of visitors means a greater police presence and numerous adverts about personal safety. For the size and scale of the event, this is a relatively low price to pay and year after year the event has passed by without a major incident. Nevertheless, conflict, crime, crisis prevention and emergency response time was a hot topic at MWC 2016 – specifically, how Smart Cities can help make countries safer.
Current Challenges
With the number of people on our planet continuing to grow, Governments and emergency departments are facing an increasing number of issues with their systems. Problems with data storage and retrieval mean that information about an incident is often slow to reach those investigating it, while in the past loss of data has led to some cases collapsing all together. Additionally, as Governments look to cut budgets, resources are becoming less and less, including staff, leading to decreased response times in an emergency. Finally, current video surveillance techniques have their limitations, with blind spots and poor quality footage being among some of the most commonly seen.
The impact of this is being felt worldwide and finding a solution is one of utmost importance. While many are looking to Governments for the answers – and the additional funding involved in most of these – ICT solutions provider Huawei proposed a different solution: Smart Cities.
Improvement through innovation
Huawei’s Safe City solutions are powered by the latest Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile broadband technologies to deliver smart, video-based security systems for cities. It uses enterprise LTE (eLTE) – a private version of the 4G networks available to consumers – to bind together a private IoT and provide the resources needed to fight crime improve safety. With Huawei’s solution, authorities can integrate a diverse range of information modules and communication methods across departments and regions, as well as combining their own video surveillance networks with other public and private security systems. In addition, vehicle-mounted and portable eLTE solutions are used to spot incidents like theft, civic disturbance and unauthorised access – eliminating blind spots in surveillance networks.
“The system enables Governments and municipal authorities to prevent crises and improve their response to emergencies,” said Joe So, CTO of Industry Solutions, Marketing & Solution Sales Department, Enterprise Business Group, Huawei. “It gives police forces ‘eyes’ where they didn’t have them before. Furthermore, police can store and organise surveillance data in the cloud, and access, share and query it with greater ease and accuracy. Meanwhile, sophisticated analytics tools will improve their ability to identify, classify and match stored video.”
Perhaps most importantly, especially for cities with urgent needs, Huawei’s solutions can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively and are proven to work. To date, Safe Cities solutions deployed in more than 100 cities across more than 30 countries.
A better, smarter Kenya
Among these deployments is Kenya, where the number of violent terrorist attacks has been on the rise since 2011.
So said: “The problem in Kenya is that the citizens outnumber the police all the time, which is why adoption of ICT is very useful to maximise and optimise the effectiveness of policemen when they are enforcing acts in society.”
The VIP visit of the Pope, last year, is one instance where Huawei’s Smart Cities solutions was utilised. For the visit, around 300,000 people were gathered in 0.12 kilometres, with around 10,000 policeman responsible for keeping peace. Huawei identified three things it needed to do.
“We needed to separate the policemen into 30 sectors and the collaboration between those sectors was key to successfully protecting the VIP,” continued So. “We also used the broadband trunking system, where video, voice and data can be utilised at the same time. All the policemen were given devices to capture what is happening and communicate with the command centre so that the whole situation on site could be monitored using live video. Finally, we created cross-departmental collaboration using computer-aided dispatch and the geographical information system (GIS). The result was a 360-degree panoramic view of the whole situation on site.”
Away from VIP events, Huawei has also helped reduce the crime rate in Kenya. I used strong light suppression technology, for instance, to capture footage of crime when normally details would not have been able to be recorded due to it being too dark for the previous video surveillance system to pick it up. GPS was also installed in police radios, with this helping the force to track four criminals who killed two policemen in December 2015 in one incident.
So added: “We deployed this in 2014. In one year’s time, the murder rate has decreased. The robbery rate has decreased. Our car theft rate has decreased by 46%. This data came from Kenya police two days ago.”
The bigger picture
Of course, it is not just Kenya which could benefit from these sorts of solutions. Indeed, Huawei believes each and every city, would see some improvement from deploying its Smart Cities technology, whether that is in reduced crime rate faster emergency response times. Fire safety, CCTV and safety responsibilities of Government are just a few examples of the sorts of situations Huawei sees its Smart Cities solutions enhancing in the future.
So said: “Think how many cameras there are in London streets, how many are in Shenzen – when all these cameras are capturing video every single day, how are they going to be stored? We believe the Huawei Video Cloud platform is the answer to this question.”
This flexible, distributed architecture platform allows videos from different places to be centralised and managed to enable the whole video system to be looked at as one system. Operators can access 10,000 concurring videos at the same time, while smart design builds in intelligence, allowing the system to be searched by colour or day etc.
“Our vision is to enrich life through communication,” concluded So. “At the same time, our job is to provide a leading new ICT technology, not only to provide better connections, but also to provide open systems and open collaborations for us to work together.”
