Songdo IBD and Cisco: City of the Future Partners

October 30, 2009 Songdo IBD in the News One comment

By Don Southerton, Songdo IBD CityTalk Editor and Chief Blogger

Songdo IBD and Cisco are a great fit. I support both. This Economic Times article shares “Why” Cisco is investing heavy in the project.

Technoholik: Can Delhi ever be an Incheon?
23 Oct 2009, 0544 hrs IST, Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan, ET Bureau

When the folks at Cisco called up last month, inviting me to cover a conference on ‘Sustainable Cities of the Future’ in Incheon, South Korea, I was a bit confused. Firstly, why in the world was a company that mainly makes routers and switches hosting an urban issues conference mainly for Mayoral delegations from around the world?

Secondly, why did they think Technoholik would be interested? Well, it seems that Cisco sees itself as an “infrastructure” company and they want to expand the definition of that word – which brings roads, bridges, buildings and electricity to mind – to include IT as a fundamental component. I was still skeptical, but when they assured me that there would actually be live demos, it seemed like it could make interesting viewing for our television show on ET NOW.

Cisco had chosen Seoul’s twin city as the showcase since Incheon was rebuilding itself for the 2014 Asian Games (it incidentally pipped Delhi in the final round of voting). On arriving at Incheon airport, which serves as Seoul’s international airport as well, my mind began to race. How did the city that I had just arrived from, even think that it stood a chance?

The already modern city of Incheon wasn’t just upgrading – it was building an entire new district called Songdo , largely reclaimed from the sea, as part of a new Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) to take advantage of its imminent fame as Asian Games host.

The advantage of building from scratch of course, is that they can incorporate the kind of futuristic tech that folks like Cisco are hoping will be a part of every major city in the near future. We’re not talking about flying cars. But if your traffic lights and electric grid are on a network, while your automobile number plates have smart tags embedded, cities can save power by switching off street lights when no cars are on certain parts of the road. Plumbing and gas lines can be maintained better with sensors while energy consumption can be monitored and optimised .

Lets take buildings as another example. At the construction stage itself along with laying ducts for electricity and gas, builders of the future will lay network cables and sensors into the steel and concrete itself. One such developer in Songdo, GALE International , actually had a ‘wired’ building up and running, which was entirely IP-enabled .

The resident could control every light switch, door, security camera, window shade and appliance from a set of touchscreen panels in the house. This wasn’t just for convenience – the main draw was the ability to see how much energy the apartment was consuming (and more importantly , wasting) so that adjustments could be made by allowing natural light and heat using window shades, switching off parts of the central AC, and turning off unused power sources. This was being done both for individual dwellings and for common areas of the building.

The “media room” of course had a videoconferencing unit (Cisco’s high-end “TelePresence” system, what else!) built into the large-screen home theatre. The interesting thing was that one could access various services via the large LCD TV in a sort of “municipal app store” way. One could dial in and videochat with the local police department , the school, civic services, supermarkets or just browse the interactive options they offered.

Cisco in fact hopes to convince cities that such an approach could actually generate additional revenue apart from providing basic services more efficiently. You can see this futuristic building and some more examples of urban tech from Incheon on the Technoholik show this weekend! In fact my two days in Incheon seemed even more of a mirage of sorts, these past few weeks, as I scanned the papers and our lack of preparedness for the Commonwealth Games dominated the headlines. But a glimmer of hope came from one of those headlines when I read that Sam Pitroda had been appointed advisor of Cabinet Rank to the Prime Minister on, get this, Infrastructure, Innovation and Information! Our wired future hopefully, ain’t that far away!