The only constant when it comes to infrastructure is evolution. Infrastructure has never been static. From the ancient Roman plumbing systems to the electric streetlamps of the 1800s, we’ve continuously improved and upgraded our infrastructure. Today is no exception. Our infrastructure is in critical need of updating and, this time, it’s more than physical: the next evolution of infrastructure will be digital.
A Brief History of Infrastructure
Infrastructure is made up of all the things that make a city: roads, railways, electricity, water, plumbing. And, today, it includes other critical technological innovations like connectivity. Prior to industrialization, infrastructure consisted mainly of roads and canals. Canals were used for transportation and irrigation. Sea navigation was aided by ports and lighthouses. A few advanced cities had aqueducts that serviced public fountains and baths, while fewer had sewers.
Between 1700 and the 1900s, many new and novel advances in infrastructure occurred, including railways, electricity, water distribution, telegraph networks and the subway. With the advent of the 20th century, the first electrical power station was built in England which set the stage for the modern power transmission and distribution grid. Soon after, Marconi harnessed radio waves to create instantaneous long-distance communications.
Throughout history, infrastructure developments have driven advances in civilization supporting the growth of modern industrial economies. Infrastructure innovations are complex, unpredictable, capital intensive, and anything but static.
Today, our infrastructure is in desperate needs of an update to become more efficient in order to reduce our impact on the climate and more equitably distribute resources. This means infrastructure needs to evolve to keep pace with human innovation and technological advancement to include market-ready technologies that can deliver outsized positive community outcomes. Tomorrow’s infrastructure will combine both physical and digital infrastructure to optimize resources and improve the lives of all.
A Digital Nervous System
Over the last several decades, the digital transformation of every aspect of human and business affairs has been profound. Billions, and soon trillions, of sensors have permeated our physical environment, tracking movement, weather, machine conditions, and much more. Compute, network, software, and platform technology innovations have become a critical part of our development. The undeniable and non-reversible effects are visible everywhere, including in our infrastructure. It can be tempting to look at the progress and sophistication of our transportation, energy, telecom, water management, and other systems and their impact on society, and believe the impact of technology is nearly over. In fact, it’s only just begun.
We Are Giving Our World a Digital Nervous System
Multiple technology developments, evolving in parallel, are reinforcing and accelerating one another: ubiquitous computing, pervasive connectivity, edge to cloud infrastructure, and AI. Cloud infrastructure resources are providing unprecedented computing scale. Faster, more pervasive wireless networks, 5G, and mobile computing devices are extending the reach of computing. Artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing intelligence to the data generated and collected by these devices, and embedded technologies at the edge are connecting and integrating a broad array of physical equipment and infrastructure systems with digital capabilities.
Each of these technologies are powerful on their own, but creative combinations of these capabilities are multiplying their impacts. Human-connected devices and machine-connected IoT devices generate exponentially more data, which is most valuable in near real-time. Connected networks and edge computing enable us to capture the data and deliver data to private or public clouds to collect and sort the information and set the stage for AI to analyze and capture new insights and optimize the way machines, systems and people interact.
Collectively, infrastructure that is poorly maintained or ill-equipped to handle a growing population is costing our economy billions of dollars in lost productivity and reduced efficiency. Investing in the safety, efficiency, and reliability of our transportation systems and physical infrastructure will increase safety for our communities, strengthen sustainability, and help insulate the economy from unexpected disruptions. The core digital technologies driving digital transformation—ubiquitous computing, pervasive connectivity, cloud to edge infrastructure and AI—have the potential to multiply the impact of physical infrastructure investment and create massive new opportunities for states, counties, cities, and communities.
Improved Connectivity
One of the areas of infrastructure that will soon evolve dramatically is connectivity. Broadband access is no longer optional, but a requirement to participate in modern human society. In the not-far-off future, traditional IT and telephony devices will become a very small portion of the connected world. Consider that the number of connected devices already on Earth, almost 7.5 billion, has surpassed the number of people alive on the planet. The installed base could easily approach 30 billion units in 2025, over three times the global population. Wireless technology convergence, combined with the new world of IoT and Smart Systems, is quickly ushering in an era where people, machines, devices, sensors and businesses could all be connected and able to interact with each other, virtually in real-time.
Today, many schemes and so-called “standards” for device connectivity exist, but users need a single solution that works seamlessly for everything, and therein lies the challenge. A device connectivity network of that scale, supporting the necessary automation and application diversity, has never been assembled before.
5G & Private LTE are Driving Connectivity
Cellular 5G, or the 5th Generation mobile network, and soon, 6G, promises to change the game for wireless networking. Multi-gigabyte-per-second data speeds, ultra-low latency, greater reliability and increased overall network capacity, among other improvements, uniquely position 5G to support the data and connectivity requirements of many thousands of connected systems. This is especially relevant to mission critical industries, where the trend of Industry 4.0 creates new opportunities—and new vulnerabilities.
Within the fast-paced 5G evolution, a new generation of wireless communications—known as Private LTE and 5G networks—has been developed specifically for challenging mission- and business-critical environments. Because wireless spectrum is a finite physical resource, the political solution had to precede the technical one in this case. Advisors and corporate consortia evangelized the idea for a few years, and then governmental agencies allocated the spectrum to make it possible.
In the U.S., the new wireless voice and data service is called Citizens Broadband Radio System (CBRS), located at 3.5GHz. In Europe and globally, it’s at unlicensed 5GHz and can be accessed through MulteFire. This evolution of cellular networking technology allows enterprises to deploy dedicated networks that can cater to the most specific business and IoT connectivity needs. It also introduces an added layer of network security to bolster existing security management around mission critical assets.
Microgrids & Distributed Energy
Another key area of infrastructure evolution is power distribution. Like many other phenomena in the 21st century, the power sector is moving from a centralized system to a distributed system. To put it another way, power is starting to tend toward a peer-to-peer architecture. Microgrids—more recently called smart grids—are the most technically sophisticated of the many distributed energy resource (DER) solutions transforming the power sector.
Smart grids are essentially subsets of larger electrical utility grids, designed to give organizations greater control over their energy resources and to make better use of utility-provided energy in conjunction with locally produced power. Most importantly, smart grids can connect and disconnect from the larger grid, thus operating both connected to a grid or as an island.
Innovative Power Technologies are Transforming the Energy Grid
The smart grid and the utility grid are linked by a “point of common coupling” that maintains voltage at a constant level until there is a problem on the utility’s grid. If the utility’s power starts to fluctuate, the smart grid taps its on-site energy production to even out the flow. If the larger grid goes down completely, the smart grid disconnects and uses its own local generating and/or storage capacity to provide power.
Because smart grids are a connected and highly-instrumented phenomenon, they are by definition a huge IoT opportunity. They incorporate a wide array of sensors that can sample electrical current at up to 60,000 times per second. This huge volume of data feeds sophisticated AI algorithms both at the edge and at the core, allowing smart grids to operate autonomously. And the energy flow from smart grids is two-way, which requires specialized software to manage scenarios that involve selling as well as buying electrical energy.
By applying complex IoT solutions, which facilitate automation on an industrial scale, smart grids can improve energy efficiency at the source. By integrating IoT and digital twins technologies across vast infrastructures like power plants, suppliers can shave time and labor from their presently manual processes. This translates to vast savings. And simplifying processes through the use of a connected IoT system can provide predictive maintenance and improve outage management, offering a significant degree of stability and optimization in an ever-evolving and unpredictable market.
Physical Meets Digital in the Future Infrastructure
Many economists see infrastructure spending as having a significant multiplier effect: the economic gains that come from infrastructure investment generate values and benefits far greater than initial spending. A 2014 University of Maryland study found that infrastructure investments added as much as $3 to gross domestic product (GDP) growth for every $1 spent.
It is imperative that cities and communities find ways to distribute resources more sustainably and equitably, ultimately providing all residents and workers with more and better quality-of-life opportunities. Infrastructure is increasingly seen as a key driver of the attractiveness and competitiveness of places, and infrastructure investments directly correlate to increases in real estate value.
With physical and digital worlds becoming permanently intertwined, investment in digital infrastructure can generate profound impacts for communities across the country. This next evolution of infrastructure will require a true shift in thinking about how people, physical infrastructure and resources will interact and how they will be integrated. City planners should strive for much more than just upgrading aging infrastructure; they should look forward to a unified, intelligent system of systems that incorporates new physical and digital infrastructure while supporting communities in new and novel ways. ◆
