Huawei�s ICT drive to make cities �safer and smarter�
Brian Benza | Thursday April 30, 2015 16:48
Through innovative ICT infrastructure and solutions such as video surveillance, eLTE broadband trunking, Unified Communications and video conferencing systems, Huawei said African cities would be ‘smarter’.
They add that the technology can facilitate active prevention before incidents, quick response during incidents and precise retrieval after incidents in public areas.
The technology, which targets incidents such as crime, traffic and human congestion and natural disasters is already in use in four African countries including Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Madagascar.
Speaking at the Huawei Safe City Africa Summit held here on Tuesday, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Industry Solutions at Huawei Enterprise, Joe So said innovative infrastructure is the foundation to building safe smart cities.
“The concept introduces the use of a consolidated IT platform, which converges public safety information, obtained through channels such as video surveillance, access control. Also other identification technologies, together with multi-agency collaboration between parties such as emergency services, road and traffic agencies, and law enforcement authorities, to name a few. “We have partnered with several telecommunications and governments internationally and in Africa with the Safe City technology now being used by 400 million people covering 100 cities in 30 countries globally. The technology however requires reliable broadband capacity to operate efficiently,” he said.
Growing terrorism activities on the continent and the recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa were cited as some of the real life examples that the technology could help manage. Through gathering of data from channels such as video surveillance or access control analysis can be run on a single integrated platform usually at a command centre.
Wireless Solutions director at Huawei South Africa, Rose Moyo said negotiations to strike partnership deals for the installation of the technology with several other Eastern and Southern African countries including Botswana are ongoing.
Huawei’s business consists of three major divisions, namely the carrier network business group, enterprise business group and consumer business group.
In Botswana, Huawei is a major partner of Mascom in the launch of its 4G technology with further network infrastructure cooperation with BTCL, BoFiNet and beMOBILE.
Giving a keynote address at the Summit, President of Huawei Eastern and Southern Africa, Li Peng said the Safe City solutions would help to build more harmonious urban residential, business and tourism environments. This is to attract investment and increase employment for sustainable economic development.
“The acceleration of global urbanisation and the proliferation of the internet will drive the convergence of ICT and urban infrastructure. Countries worldwide are actively formulating plans for the development of safe and smart cities to seize new opportunities generated by global urbanisation,” he said.
At the summit, safe city project leaders from many countries including Madagascar, Kenya, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom shared their experience on ICT best practices to enhance public safety with innovation.
Richard Chace, Chairman of the Global Security Industry Alliance (GSIA), shared his insights from the perspective of global safe city standards and trends.
He said: “I am very focused on how urbanisation trends around the world are driving the specification and implementation of safe city technologies and solutions. I feel very strongly that successful safe city programmes build heavily on well-developed public-private partnerships that are designed to be ‘win-win’. The best use of technology is the one driven by sound planning that first seeks to define problems and then match the right manageable solutions for the long term”.
The summit featured keynote speeches and breakout sessions, and gathered government administrators, customers, partners, and industry experts.
These included Dr Siyabonga Cwele, South Africa’s Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services, Mmamoloko Kubayi, South Africa’s Chairperson of Telecommunications and Postal Service Committee, Randimbisoa Blaise Richard, Ministry of Public Safety of Madagascar, and Rong Yansong, Economic and Commercial Counsellor of the Chinese Embassy in South Africa.