In Korea: Cisco's showcase for a smart city
In Korea: Cisco's showcase for a smart city
By Roger Cheng, Dow Jones Newswires
Monday 27 September 2010
Chadwick International School features two high-end telepresence systems.
Cisco Systems Inc.'s fingerprints are unmistakenly all over the newly opened Chadwick International School.
The school, which primarily serves expatriate children in the Incheon district of Songdo, features two high-end telepresence video systems, and boasts regular use of Cisco's online meeting service WebEx to connect with its sister Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, Calif. It plans to provide every student with a Flip video camera, with videos stored and accessed by a digital media vault supplied by the network-equipment provider.
"This building screams of not more of the same," said Chadwick Principal Jorge Nelson, who calls the connectivity the "secret sauce" in the school's unique curriculum.
Chadwick International, the dozens of in-construction buildings in Songdo and even the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course at the edge of the district are all part of a broader initiative by Cisco to build a connected city, which it views as a model for how it can contribute to future city developments. The project is Cisco's most ambitious push to get into the business of building "smart cities," a market that the company expects could be worth $12 billion over the next three years.
"We want to create this as a showcase for the world," said Munish Khetrapal, director of Asia enterprise operations for Cisco.
While the potential of the market could be huge, analysts suspect that the payoff may take a while. Given the bureaucratic hurdles, reliance on property development schedules and funding, and uncertainty over the willingness of cities to make such an investment, few expect it to meaningfully contribute to revenue anytime soon.
"The cities are still on a fact-finding mission," said Bettina Tratz-Ryan, an analyst at Gartner.
The Incheon project is part of a $2 billion investment that Cisco earmarked in April for South Korea. The company plans to build a center to manage the underlying Internet protocol platform, which can control everything from the city's power management and traffic controls to an individual apartment's lighting and temperature.
"The core concept is of a connected city with a very big data center, which is the brains of the city," said T.Y. Lau, an analyst at research firm Canalys.
Individual apartments feature panels in each room that control lighting, temperature and access to media. The preferences and settings are stored in the central data center, which is also responsible for maintainance. In addition, 20,000 units feature Cisco's home version of telepresence.
Cisco, better known for its networking equipment, considers the transportation hub of South Korea--Incheon is home to a major seaport and largest airport in the country--the ideal testbed. The broadband infrastructure in the country is mature, the population is technically savvy, and local officials from the Incheon Free Economic Zone have embraced technology in their planning.
"I believe that this project matches the concept of IFEZ's smart city development," said Han Suk Choo, director of Incheon's smart city initiative.
The IFEZ is a region made up of reclaimed land in the Incheon districts of Songdo, the adjacent region of Cheongna and the island Yeongjong. It is at the heart of an ambitious plan by Incheon city officials to create a new center with tax breaks to attract international businesses, as well attract residents looking to get out of the increasingly crowded capital of Seoul, which is 90 minutes northeast.
The IFEZ region is still early in its development stage. There are rows of commerical and residential towers still under construction. As of August, the zone boasted a population of 65,716, but city officials hope that by 2014, it will be home to 450,000 people, or roughly the size of Miami. Cisco is hoping the technological touches will serve as a draw.
"The city is built from the ground up with the fabric of using technology," Khetrapal said.
Like the new development in Incheon, other new cities may be interested in Cisco's plan, Lau said, noting that existing cities may be more reluctant to shed their legacy infrastructure.
Tratz-Ryan, however, said she believes that existing cities with older infrastructure could stand to benefit more from some of the platforms that Cisco is offering. Beyond Cisco, International Business Machines Corp. and Siemens AG have also started working with various city developments.
For Incheon, the technical possibilities have seeped into every aspect of Songdo, even to the traditionally conservative ranks of local golfers. Khetrapal said it was an easy sell when he talked about the idea of cameras embedded along the course that could record a golfer's swing while teeing off, analyze it and send the video to individual smartphones.
"Everyone wants to improve their stroke," he said.