The tender for turning Jerusalem into the biggest smart city in Israel has been completed. Under the terms of the tender, a millimeter-wave (extremely high frequency) high-speed communications network will be deployed in the city connecting municipal offices, educational institutions, and security cameras at junctions and in parks in the city using bandwidth in the hundreds and thousands of megabits per second. The millimeter-wave network will also serve as a fast and stable infrastructure for smart city applications. The Jerusalem Municipality intends to deploy WiFi services as part of the tender.
The NIS 6 million first stage of the tender was won by SMBIT, which in recent years has led the millimeter wave revolution that makes it possible to set up high-speed communications infrastructure without laying optic fiber cables or complex and costly infrastructure work that causes inconvenience to the public.
The technology has already been successfully implemented in several cities in Israel and in major cities around the world such as New York, San Francisco, and London. The Jerusalem Municipality tender is unusual in its scope, covering the entire city. Instead of optic cables being laid, the network will use lampposts, traffic lights, and tall buildings as the infrastructure for the smart city. Small communications boxes produced by Israeli company Siklu will be installed on these structures, turning the municipality into an Internet service provider for all municipal installations and institutions.
SMBIT will start rolling out the infrastructure in the next few months. If all goes according to plan, by the end of 2019 most of Jerusalem will already be covered. Such rapid deployment is not possible with technology requiring optic cables to be laid. High-resolution security cameras will be connected to the new municipal center recently inaugurated, giving better surveillance and control in the urban space.
The WiFi network that will be connected to the millimeter wave network will enable the municipality to run a private communications network that it controls serving the city's residents and its many tourist visitors both routinely and in emergencies, when it will provide a solution for first responders in the event of the collapse of the regular communications infrastructure.
The new infrastructure will save the Jerusalem Municipality the cost of point-to-point infrastructure currently paid to communications providers. This will mean a huge saving in the municipal budget, enabling resources to be diverted other municipal services.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 5, 2019
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