Singapore looks to 5G for smart city boost

INTERVIEW: Edwin Low, director of Innovation and Tech Ecosystem at Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), argued inclusion must be a cornerstone of smart city deployments to ensure all segments of society reap the benefits.

Low explained Singapore’s smart city vision involves delivering systems which “impact and transform how we work, how we live, how we play”.

The city state has a holistic vision of what smart nation and smart city mean, and invested in its technology ecosystem to deliver the “latest and greatest” to help people and businesses “cope better with the evolving digital change that we are being engulfed by”.

IMDA believes 5G will be a key catalyst in Singapore’s digital transformation: Low explained the technology holds the potential to fuel “future economic transformation and longer-term growth and competitiveness to prepare us for the next phase of the digital economy”. “I think 5G infrastructure is going to unlock a host of applications and digital services that we probably haven’t imagined yet”.

Low noted the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic created a need to evolve business models given restrictions on in-person meetings and travel.

“You need to find new ways of customer engagement, that’s coming to the fore and I don’t think that’s going away.”