City Infrastrutures

In Canada, cities such as Ottawa, Hamilton, Toronto, Vancouver-Surrey and Montreal are already leading the way, researching and investing in smart technologies to change their local infrastructure's nature and economics. According to IDC, smart city spending is expected to reach $3 Billion in Canada by 2022. The Ontario capital broke into the top 10 smartest cities in the world according to 2018's Motion Index. Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal weren't far behind, all placing in the top 30 cities worldwide for smart city adoption.

Smart Buildings technology allows building owners the opportunity to manage their buildings more efficiently and effectively. Building owners and managers harness the tremendous opportunity that smart building technology offers to make buildings more efficient, including tracking, monitoring and reducing energy use, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and lowering operational costs. Smart Buildings technology continuously gathers raw data from devices that control the building's heating, ventilation, air conditioning, hot water, heating and lighting systems allowing business owners significant operational savings. There are already +100 buildings with Smart Building Technology installed in Canada, allowing more than $3 Million in savings.

As an early adopter of LED lighting, Canada is primed to lead smart city technology. Of the more than three million streetlights in Canada, 75 percent have been, or will soon be, converted to LEDs. Canada has gotten smarter with its lighting, and the timing is perfect for taking the next step and investing in smart city infrastructure

Adopting technology such as SmartGrid provides cities with data that can enable government employees to be more efficient. Collected traffic data has the ability to help city planners mitigate high areas of congestion, pedestrians avoid traffic, and police and emergency vehicles arrive at a crash scene faster.

Canada's wireless telecommunications industry continues to be a driving force in the Canadian economy. Canada's wireless sector contributed $74.5 billion to the Canadian economy in 2019, representing 2.5% of the total Canadian GDP. Facilities-based wireless network operators made $3.1 billion in capital investments in 2018 to expand and upgrade Canada's wireless infrastructure. It is estimated that, between 2020 and 2026, $26 billion will be spent in deploying 5G infrastructure in Canada, with most of such investment being made by Canada's facilities-based wireless operators.

Urban data management is already an essential element of modern cities. The authorities can build on the variety of automatically generated information and develop intelligent services that improve citizens' daily lives, save environmental resources, or help cope with emergencies. From a data mining perspective, urban data introduce a lot of challenges. Data volume, velocity and veracity are some obvious obstacles. However, there are even more equal importance issues like data quality, resilience, privacy and security.

Exponential technologies, big data, and advanced analytics are revolutionizing policing across Canada and around the world. While they can't replace the human element and back-to-basics policing, these real, emerging, or aspirational technologies disrupt traditional policing models for the better. They're providing new ways to help police services connect to citizens, build trust, and strengthen relationships with communities. They can also improve public safety—a recent study suggests smart technologies could help cities reduce crime by 30 to 40 percent and enable 20 to 35 percent faster response times for emergency services.