Public Sector, Municipalities & Smart City

In city technologies a large share of the hardware sits not inside a building but on a pole, in a kerbside cabinet and in a junction enclosure. Those positions are open to rain, dust, summer heat and surges from lightning; every maintenance call is made in the middle of traffic, with the road closed. How often the box will have to be opened is as much part of the design as the IP66 rating of what goes inside it.

Excavation is what usually breaks the line

Devices at a junction and along a transport corridor are often fed from the street lighting supply, so a feed switched off by day leaves a night-working device blind in daylight. A fibre route has no defence against a digger bucket: roadworks by another authority can cut the city's video traffic in two within minutes. Topology is laid out so that one severed leg cannot stop the whole flow, and critical nodes are fed from two directions.

A building that can turn nobody away at the door

A public service building is open to the citizen, and asking for identity at the entrance is impossible for most transactions. Protection is built not at the door but inside it. The passage between the application counter and the staff floors is tied to authorisation, the hall where the queue moves is watched, and evacuation exits stay free throughout opening hours. Separating the interior route without making entry harder is the engineering problem peculiar to municipal and state buildings.