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Smart Cities Playbook from Telecom Infra Project (TIP)

Back in summer, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) published a Playbook for Smart Cities. For people who may not understand, you can think of a Playbook as a case study but playbook is much more than case study. A case study shows how a company did something but it may not be relevant for anyone else or any scenario. If a scenario is repeatable then a playbook can be created with a complete process, workflows, procedures, communication needs, strategies, etc. Other companies can then follow the playbook to provide similar results and outputs.


The Executive summary of the playbook states:

This playbook is an output of the Smart City Connectivity sub-group within the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) mmWave Networks Project Group. It’s the result of a collaboration between TIP Members —operators, infrastructure providers, system integrators, and equipment vendors—to provide guidance to key audiences (especially municipalities) about the deployment of communication services at the street level. Collaborating in TIP, we aim to streamline and accelerate network deployments.

The members of the TIP Smart City Connectivity sub-group are collaborating to address several of the major friction points in the deployment of communications equipment on street assets.
  • The Integrated Hardware Asset workstream addresses aspects of equipment design, approval, and installation.
  • The Best Practices workstream focuses on aspects of site identification, planning permission and permission to deploy. In both cases, our goal is to identify practical approaches to solutions rather than document the status quo.
  • The End-2-End Architecture workstream creates disaggregated end-to-end network architectures for diverse use cases in urban deployments
In this playbook, we cover smart city service requirements, an overview of mmWave technology, mmWave spectrum and deployment regulation and best practices recommendations.

The mmWave sections are intended to educate infrastructure providers and cities so that they can take an informed approach to technology selection. We provide an introduction to the technology and explore different deployment scenarios. While this document focuses initially on mmWave networks technology and deployment considerations, we expect the scope to widen to include a variety of technologies that rely on network densification.

The PDF is available here.

One of the products featured in the playbook is CCS Metnet which is providing neutral host microwave backhaul for many different scenarios. The product details and case study is available on their website here. The following video provides more details.

You can also see other activities from the TIP mmWave group here.

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