by Webbing Team
Over the past century, the world has undergone a profound demographic shift from predominantly rural to increasingly urban living. In 1920, only about 20% of the global population lived in urban areas. Today, more than half, approximately 4.4 billion people, reside in cities. According to the World Bank, this number is expected to double by 2050, when nearly 7 out of every 10 people will be city dwellers.
This surge in urban population inevitably leads to a series of cascading challenges – an increase of congestion, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and mounting strain on aging infrastructure, to name but a few. These issues pose serious concerns for municipalities and city dwellers, increasing their demand for smart solutions for resource management, transportation optimization, public safety, and sustainability.
The concept of smart cities emerged as a response to these challenges, and functional smart cities as widespread interconnected systems have been evolving for 15 years. Their growth has become especially significant in the past 5–8 years due to advances in IoT and cellular technology.
Smart cities could serve as a demonstration of nearly every use case in cellular IoT connectivity, from smart traffic management and video surveillance to building automation and logistics & delivery. While these applications may seem different from other industries’ use cases (like, say, predictive maintenance in manufacturing), because they are implemented on a city-wide scale and aim to improve quality of life, technology wise they are similar.
However, there are a number of applications that are specific for smart cities, like streetlight monitoring or smart waste management. Let’s take a look at the most prominent examples of how cellular connectivity helps make our cities smarter:
Bright Ideas: How Connected Lighting Improves Efficiency and Safety
Traditional streetlights operate on timers or manual controls, often wasting energy or leaving areas poorly lit. With cellular-connected smart lighting systems, they can adjust brightness based on the time of day or motion detection, improving both energy efficiency and public safety. Moreover, each smart streetlight can automatically report issues such as bulb failures or power loss, which helps optimize maintenance and ensure continuous service.
In their forecast, Kaleido Intelligence predicted that by 2027, the highest number of smart cities’ cellular connections will be found in the smart lighting space, with over 161 million lights to be linked to cellular networks. It is also important to note that smart streetlights and other systems are often served by gateways, with a single cellular connection relaying data to and from many devices, even if these endpoints rely on non-cellular technology. Another report forecasts that smart city providers will leverage cellular networks, underpinned by eSIMs, as gateways to low-power connections for the monitoring and management of smart city services.
A good real-life example is the town of West Springfield which deployed a cellular-based intelligent lighting solution, that integrates 4G LTE connectivity into each LED streetlamp. This setup allows for remote monitoring and control via a cloud-based central management system, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs.
Next-Gen Mobility: Cellular Connectivity in Smart Transit Infrastructure
Traffic management in general is one of the most important use cases for cellular connectivity in smart cities. Cellular-enabled cameras, sensors and controllers are widely used in traffic signal coordination and parking management, to ensure real-time adjustment for smooth traffic flow. But what is perhaps a more prominent use case is public transport tracking. Buses, trams, shuttles and trains share live location and ETA data via 4G/5G, making fleet management easier and improving the rider experience. Smart kiosks and signage also rely on mobile networks to remotely receive and update information on public transportation schedules and changes.
Another important application is monitoring the health status of the vehicles to ensure that there is no disruption to services and leverage preventive and predictive maintenance techniques. It allows operators to lower the cost of maintaining vehicles and to keep a smaller fleet, as fewer vehicles are undergoing maintenance at any given time. Analysts forecast that by 2032, public transportation will use 7.3 million connections, offering real-time vehicle tracking, on-board payments, and internet services to passengers.
Connected Bins, Cleaner Cities: The Rise of Smart Waste Systems
One of the major challenges that the growth of the cities brings is the increase in the amount of waste. Today, more than two billion tonnes of municipal solid waste are generated every year across the globe, and this generation is predicted to grow from 2.1 billion tonnes in 2023 to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050.
To tackle this challenge, smart cities deploy smart waste bins with fill-level sensors. These connected bins report when they need to be emptied, which allows municipalities to optimize collection routes. This is no small matter for urban areas: according to the Global Waste Management Outlook 2024, collection takes up approximately 60% of all direct costs of municipal solid waste management. Moreover, it helps keep cities cleaner in all ways, as it both prevents bins overflow and reduces fuel use and carbon emissions from garbage trucks.
Some cities have been using the technology for over a decade now. For example, the Seoul metropolitan government installed smart bins for general waste and recyclables in particularly crowded areas of the city center back in 2014, using 2G and 3G technology to send real-time data from the sensors to a central control system. Today, the South Korean capital is leading the charge in 5G-powered waste management, reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 20%. Furthermore, the system integrates AI algorithms to predict bin capacity based on historical data and local events like festivals or markets, ensuring timely collection and minimizing overflow.
Tracking Urban Health: Air, Noise, and Weather Insights via Cellular IoT
Smart cities rely on cellular connectivity to collect and transmit real-time data about urban conditions. This data plays a crucial role in improving public health and guiding city planning.
Air quality sensors are one of the most widely deployed tools. These sensors measure pollutants such as carbon monoxide or particulate matter and send the data via cellular networks to centralized dashboards and mobile apps. This enables city officials to track pollution hotspots and take necessary actions to improve air quality, while for residents, it provides greater transparency.
Noise and weather sensors provide localized insights into environmental conditions across a city. Cellular IoT allows these sensors to be deployed wherever needed, even in areas without fixed connectivity. Noise data can help urban planners address traffic or construction-related disturbances, and weather sensors give real-time updates on temperature, humidity, wind, rainfall etc. Along with city planning, this information supports city operations, such as managing outdoor events or issuing storm warnings to the public.
For instance, Barcelona has installed over 100 sensor units across multiple districts to monitor ambient noise levels, helping local authorities accurately identify and respond to excessive disturbances. Using a grid-based system, urban planners can generate heat maps to visualize where noise levels exceed recommended thresholds.
Structural Integrity: Real-Time Infrastructure Monitoring with Cellular IoT
Infrastructure monitoring is one of the most impactful applications of cellular connectivity in smart cities. By enabling real-time data transmission from sensors and control systems, cities can maintain safer, more efficient, and more responsive infrastructure. Structural health monitoring uses cellular-connected IoT sensors embedded in critical infrastructure like bridges, tunnels, and high-rise buildings.
Monitoring systems typically would unite multiple cameras and sensors, including the ones that continuously track conditions such as pressure, vibration, temperature, or strain. If unusual patterns are detected, such as stress that could indicate a developing crack, maintenance teams are alerted immediately. This proactive approach helps prevent accidents and extend the lifespan of costly infrastructure, and optimizes maintenance costs.
Because cellular-enabled monitoring devices don’t require extensive wiring or trenching, they can be deployed virtually anywhere. This makes them especially valuable for infrastructure objects located in hard-to-access or high-risk environments.
Connectivity Requirements for Smart Cities Applications
Cellular connectivity plays a foundational role in smart city ecosystems, acting as the central communication backbone for a wide range of urban technologies. While technical requirements may differ for certain applications, there are several common critical factors to consider when deploying cellular-connected systems in smart cities:
Latency
Low latency is vital for many smart city applications that depend on real-time responsiveness. In use cases such as adaptive traffic signals or emergency alert systems, even a brief delay in data transmission can lead to safety risks. Latency also affects public-facing services like smart kiosks or surveillance systems, where instant feedback or video streaming is expected. However, it is important to remember that while cellular networks can offer better latency than other connectivity methods, actual latency depends on your provider’s core network architecture, since the data needs to travel to the nearest data center before going to its destination.
Coverage
Comprehensive and stable coverage is critical for deploying smart city solutions across both dense urban cores and outlying districts. Applications such as environmental monitoring, smart streetlights, and connected waste bins often need to operate in areas where wired networks are impractical. Cellular connectivity, especially with multi-network access and fallback options, is often the only feasible solution. Without sufficient coverage, service interruptions can occur, undermining the reliability of citywide systems.
Compliance with Regulations
Smart cities must navigate a complex regulatory landscape involving data sovereignty, privacy laws, and technical compliance standards. Devices handling citizen data, transmitting across borders, or using public cellular networks are subject to national and local legislation. These requirements are constantly evolving, which means connectivity solutions must be flexible enough to adapt to changing regulations. Using cellular providers that offer localized profiles, data routing control, and built-in compliance tools helps future-proof smart city deployments.
Data Usage Control
Managing data consumption is essential for cities deploying thousands of connected devices. Systems that transmit video feeds, telemetry data, or frequent status updates can generate high volumes of traffic, so municipalities need visibility and control over how much data each device uses to stay within budget. Features like usage throttling, automated alerts, and dynamic data policy enforcement allow smart cities to operate efficiently without facing unexpected costs or service interruptions.
Webbing’s Connectivity Solution for Smart Cities
Webbing provides reliable, low-latency internet connectivity for solutions that drive improvements in traffic management, infrastructure monitoring, smart lighting, waste management, and other smart city applications.
Webbing’s connectivity solutions guarantee global coverage, and our partner network of over 600 mobile operators worldwide allows IoT devices to roam on several carriers’ network in every region. It solves the problem of weak spots that any mobile network may have and ensures full coverage and continuous connectivity for all units, anywhere.
Webbing is a full MVNO that has a fully redundant distributed core network infrastructure with data centers on every continent. It is well suited to support mission-critical, high-data consumption type of use cases and provides connectivity stability and low latency. It also allows for all types of localization, making it easy to comply with local regulation requirements even in heavily regulated markets.
Our eSIM solution ensures failover connectivity with the capability of using multiple mobile carrier profiles, easily changing carriers at any time, and an option to fall back from a failing profile to a different profile without any need to communicate with a remote server. Webbing also offers a portal to manage eSIMs throughout their lifecycle. It allows for defining business rules that govern the automatic profile swap process and provides visibility to profile usage and network events, to guarantee transparent connectivity. With Webbing’s solution enterprises can manage connected devices in bulks, easily scale global IoT deployments, monitor and control the data usage of each device.
Our solutions help enterprises overcome their connectivity problems and reduce time to market for global deployments, providing the benefits of roaming with multiple carrier options and seamless transition between carriers with a single SIM.
Reach out today to learn more about Webbing’s connectivity solutions for smart city applications.
