Developing smart city devices with an end-to-end IoT solutions provider

Smart city devices now represent among the most attractive and scalable sectors in the IoT. Smart city innovations have progressed so rapidly that features and applications which only recently were unviable are now commercially scalable. Smart city devices now range from established use cases like micromobility, connected streetlights and intelligent waste management to more infrastructural projects like air quality monitoring and e-governance platforms. Yet these opportunities come with numerous complex challenges. To ensure resilience, for instance, smart city deployments require multiple carrier certifications, regulatory compliance and adherence to trading rules. They also need to be flexible to enable innovation and ensure maximum uptime.

Deployments might previously have totalled 10,000 easily manageable smart city devices, addressing just a few simple needs. But older approaches are rapidly becoming unmanageable for deployments in which hundreds of thousands of connected devices are required. Smart city solutions must now routinely integrate modules, antennas and processors with software, operating systems, applications and user interfaces. They also call for supporting services which include certification, antenna optimization, RTK corrections, original design manufacturer (ODM) offerings and security.

Older approaches require coordinated purchases from multiple vendors, with complicated specification and buying procedures, or trying to develop in-house capability. Both are increasingly time- and cost-prohibitive with rising expectations of smart cities to do more with less. Disjointed multi-vendor approaches are now simply too inefficient, slow and expensive for modern business cases. The next wave of smart city devices is therefore focusing on the advantages of end-to-end IoT solutions providers.

End-to-end IoT solutions providers help their partners achieve simplicity of supply across hardware, software and services. Using a single supplier with global scale also enables flexibility to prioritize innovation and capacity to support massive deployments with shorter time-to-market. End-to-end IoT solutions providers like Quectel can also ensure developers enjoy simplified access to all the technologies they need - from cellular to GNSS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and every variation on antennas that may be required. To understand how smart cities are using end-to-end IoT solutions providers for entire smart city device projects, and to augment existing internal resources, join our expert-led webinar and learn how to maximize the benefits of efficient sourcing of hardware, software and services.