Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The future of smart cities with Ralph de la Vega of AT&T — CES 2016 interview”.
Hey everybody, I’m Jordan Golson here for the verge on the floor of CES day one and I’m here with Ralph de la Vega, ATT CEO of mobile and business solutions thanks for joining us great to be here thanks very much atts had a business show so far Announcing a whole bunch of different things, but we’re here to talk about your smart cities initiative. Can you tell us a bit about that? We we love what we’re doing with smart cities. Jordan, you know we’re a global leader in connected devices connecting more than 25 million devices, so we’re taking that expertise that we have developed over the years to connect any number of things, helping enterprises to be more successful and improve their performance to cities. So cities can be what we call smart cities that operate smarter infrastructure, smarter transportation systems in a more sustainable fashion got it and that’s interesting, because well not everybody interacts with a business. 18 teens got a lot of customers, but it’s not a hundred percent, but everybody has to interact with the city, whether its water or sewer or traffic, or something like that how’s this going to help the average American well.
I think this is the beauty over, because I think the whole effort of the cities that we have announced as spotlight cities, which include Atlanta, Dallas and Chicago. It’S all focused on what we can do to help the citizens of the city enjoy their life better. Whether it’s reduced traffic better ways to find parking spots, a more sustainable water system, I think it depends on each city and each city is having a slightly different focus, the kids that we can bring to the city, a complete end-to-end solution, working with partners like GE, Like Cisco and a number of others, it’s it’s interesting. When you think about efficiency, you don’t usually think about government services, so this seems like an area. That’S right for opportunity. Is there anything that you’re most excited about yeah? I think transportation. You know all of us have the experience of sitting at a traffic light. There’S no traffic and you have the red light and you sit there and you sit there and you wait.
I think we can make those a lot smarter so that the infrastructure connectivity to cars in the future will eliminate some of the weight that we have an improved traffic patterns so that citizens can move around easier with less congestion in the cities. So this is a long-range vision for you, it’s a long vision also for the mayors of those cities. The thing we’re also looking at by the way, our smart airports all of us spend a lot of time in airports right and finding a parking spot getting around.
Knowing when the flights leaving things that are really common place, I think we have an opportunity also to make them smarter. So it’s going to be an incredible opportunity for cities, including their airport operations, to be improved, got it and one of the unfortunate things about cities that might cause some trouble for. You is their lack of funding a lot of cities even for essential infrastructure improvements. Just don’t have the money to do it. How do you going to overcome that? Let’S see the beauty of what we’re showing the city? Is that the same things that we’re doing for enterprises and enterprises make their investments because they feel they can get a return on that investment? So I think what we’re showing the cities – and this is a key aspect of everything we do is if they invest in in a certain technology, we can show them how they’re going to get a return on that investment to improve their operations long-term and that’s the Same aspect that we use for businesses today, so it’s showing them how to use the business processes, including the securing of the funding, to get these initiatives going that have nice payoffs over the short and long term with the company.
If they spend a lot of money with you and don’t get a return, it’s the shareholders that hurt, but with a government, it’s the taxpayers. How do we ensure that their money is being spent wisely? Well, this is where I think, there’s a lot of oversight and, for example, in Atlanta we work with the mayor and the City Council working to make sure that they’re comfortable with the proposals but we’re bringing proposals that have been proven to work in enterprises. So it’s not like we’re drawing things that I’ve never been tried before. We know that when these things get implemented, we find out better ways to run enterprises and I think, there’s much better ways to run cities as well. Every major city has issues with their water systems. Many of them are old and aging, and so I’m going to start to leak after they start to leak. It’S catastrophic right when you have a major break. We have technology now that allows them to better monitor those five, so they can give them the right maintenance before they cost a catastrophic failure. So talking about cities, you guys have announced some other things here at the show include connected cars. You know, I think, you’re up to nine major manufacturers now have nine major manufacturer week.
We love what’s happening in the car space Jordan. You know the cars are getting so smart today that in the future, they’ll be able to talk to each other to talk to infrastructure and to make our driving safer. I really think that what customers are asking for today is more technology in their cars to make it more effective and safer, and i think that’s exactly what the car manufacturers are giving them.
So one interesting thing about cars versus the cities is the cars are always moving, so they have to be Wireless right and we’re all worried about getting enough bandwidth on our phones and making them work is having all this stuff in the city’s going to impact that No, no, I don’t think so. I think we have playa bandwidth and these kind of services are short bursty streams of data, so that’s not very, very demanding of the data stream. It’S the key is to get the right data on a real-time basis.
You know monitoring rivers, monitoring, streams, monitoring the quality of their water systems that can be done relatively easily with cheap sensors. They just need the connectivity, wired or wireless to be able to to get the data and then to draw conclusions from that data. Whether something has happened that is catastrophic or it’s just a small leak or something that is a minor got it it’s 80 and the partners. Are you guys focusing on hardware? Are you going to be doing analysis and helping cities make better decisions from a political level which is where the biggest mine? No, I think what we’re into solving is their issues into and giving them a solution that addresses a problem that the city has identified as a key issue and solving it into, and not just by ourselves, of course, with our ecosystem of partners, including some of the Ones that I mentioned thanks very much 18 tease got a busy week here at CES, and so do we stay tuned for the verge for a lot more thanks round.
Thank you. Thank you very much. .