risk that speculative investments will not be repaid as quickly as expected43. The most ambitious smart city projects, such as India’s project to create 100 smart cities, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build more liveable and sustainable communities44. To 78 Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2016 Table 3.2: Overview of challenges and opportunities What?Why?What is done today/best practice Possible way forward Cost and reliability • Most tags and readers are not yet cheap enough to be ubiquitous.• Limited consumer use of QR codes, and perceived negative impact on aesthetics.• Costs can be too high for adoption by SMEs.• Very high reliability requirements in large-scale systems with thousands of tags and devices.• Power sources are challenging for cheap but long-life sensors.• Large investments are needed to take full advantage of “smart city” systems.• Ongoing development and deployment of cheaper, more efficient and reliable hardware and protocols.• Innovation centres to stimulate market entry and competition.• Public-private partnerships and cooperation between municipalities, businesses and contractors to reduce costs and share resources.• Standardized functions in smart phones could interact with tags and sensors, including via web browsers.• Greater attention to aesthetics of tags, such as dot-less visual codes35.• Further R&D in areas such as energy scavenging, low-energy protocols and algorithms, and high-reliability systems.Connectivity • Application-specific networks and components increase costs and reduce the opportunities to improve security and reliability.• Mobile data networks still are adapting to support large M2M systems.• Data from disparate systems are integrated at hubs, including cloud services.• Many mobile networks have M2M business units and networks with specialized business processes, including charging and system integration to support large systems.• Increased 4G deployment gives high throughput, low latency option for M2M.• Additional IoT support in next-generation cellular networks.• R&D for more common middleware and APIs, and further standardization of protocols for resource-constrained systems.Open data and APIs • IoT data is often held in “silos” that are difficult to integrate without time-consuming data discovery and licensing.• IoT platforms can be industry- and vendor-specific, limiting opportunities for SMEs and start-ups to participate.• City and country initiatives can provide for sharing of information by individuals and organizations under non-proprietary, open-source licences.• Further work is needed to encourage cataloguing and contributions to open datasets. National and local government authorities are in a key position to do this and could collaborate through Open Government Partnership.