The rapid population growth in South Africa’s metropolitan cities over the last two decades has outpaced significantly the growth in capacity of their urban infrastructure networks. Cities have to become smarter and more efficient to improve the quality of services provided to citizens. 

However, cities face another crucial constraint that limits their potential to become smarter.

Some of our metros are already using or thinking about using Internet-of-Things (IoT) architecture to create machine-to-machine (M2M) networks that allow devices – the ‘things’ in the IoT – to gather, share and analyse data about the state of city infrastructure.

This can be used to create information that helps city managers make important decisions that, for example, improve traffic flow, reduce water losses or improve the reliability of the electricity grid, often without further human intervention.

But the low-volume data these devices gather, share and analyse competes for time and bandwidth on expensive cellular and wired communication networks with high-volume data from streaming services and other similar services for human users.

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M2M transmissions consume much less data and power, so there is a significant amount of wastage and unnecessary maintenance – like periodic battery replacement or recharging – when the devices are connected through GSM networks.

This is why a dedicated M2M network makes sense, since the objective of smart cities is maximising efficiency and reducing waste.

Under exclusive licence from global innovations company Ingenu, Vula Telematix is rolling out the Machine Network SA,  a public wireless telecommunications network dedicated to machine-to-machine communications.