I live in San Diego County, and while getting my news fix this morning, I heard two reports which were pertinent to the IoT (Internet of Things) industry in which I work. The first story noted that the City of San Diego was awarded a gold medal by the Climate Action Campaign for its municipal sustainability and clean energy initiatives. And, just a few moments later, there was a story siting an audit which had been done on the city’s streetlight repairs, noting that the process was “broken” and that some lights were not repaired for months, posing safety, energy and liability issues for the city.

It was interesting to learn that while a city such as San Diego can have razor-like focus on one IoT initiative, it can also fall extremely short with another. This is not unique to “America’s Finest City”, in fact, it is quite common with municipalities. Many city services operate in silos without interaction between departments. This is a waste of resources, technology, and most importantly, money.

However, the IoT aims to alleviate these issues by providing a single platform on which applications and city services can operate. A network designed for machine-centric connectivity can serve disparate devices and be managed under one municipal roof. To use the example of San Diego, one network could initially provide connectivity for the city’s sustainability applications such as air quality monitoring, fleet management, parking, grid and water. Later, the street lighting could be IoT-enabled and then added onto the same network.

In order to accommodate these varied applications, the network would need to be widely available, have reliable municipal coverage and be able to add devices without capacity limitations. Ingenu’s RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) is just such a network. The field-proven network is being rolled out across the U.S. and the rest of the globe at a rapid pace.

Ingenu’s RPMA is ideally suited for Smart City connectivity because:

• The Machine Network™ is publicly available for a host of IoT applications and is managed by Ingenu, so the city can focus on providing services, not deploying and managing a network infrastructure.
• RPMA has the best coverage of all LPWA (low-power, wide-area) solutions, so it can connect devices through a city’s varied topology
• The network is extremely scalable and can add capacity as needed, so IoT applications from an array of departments can operate together seamlessly.

A smart city is only as smart as its network strategy; Ingenu strives to make it simply genius.