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create the city-wide infrastructure needed for smart cities takes a strong commitment from local governments and other authorities, as well as large investments and strong partnerships between municipalities, businesses and contractors. Laying new fibre-optic cables to increase the communication bandwidth available for smart city applications, for example, can be done more cheaply if contractors take advantage of shared infrastructure (such as road trenches and utility tunnels) coordinated by a local authority. This can be particularly effective when a smart city is built on a green-field site. The ITU-T focus group on smart, sustainable cities has developed specifications for multi-service infrastructure in such new-development areas. One example it provides is the new Indian city Lavasa, where a single company has been appointed to establish, maintain, and grant rights to assets such as dark fibre, rights-of-way, duct space, and towers on a lease/rent/sale basis45. In existing cities, system deployment is likely to be on an incremental basis.3.4.2 Connectivity For IoT system designers, there is a choice between centralized, cloud-based functionality and more distributed applications, where some data is stored and processed on or near the sensors. Centralized systems allow a small number of powerful computers to manage large numbers of cheap devices – although those devices must have a network interface that can connect to the Internet or to mobile phone networks. This centralized configuration has advantages when large amounts of sensor data must be processed.In a more distributed system, devices can send data to smart phones or other, nearby computing devices over a local radio protocol such as Bluetooth. These local devices can process data before sharing it further across a global network. This increases system responsiveness to a local user, and it can provide more data privacy protection – which is especially valuable for sensitive information such as health data46.Some radio protocols (such as Ultra-Narrow Band) can provide longer-range coverage, which can be useful for smart city applications such as Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2016 79 Chapter 3 Table 3.2: Overview of challenges and opportunities (end)What?Why?What is done today/best practice Possible way forward Standards (from the ITU and other organisations)• Technical standards have evolved for different appli-cations and stakeholders, making them less coherent. • Smaller national markets may lack scale to support devel-opment of local IoT solutions, unless they are built on inter-national standards.• Specific software often is needed for each system, increasing user load.• Premature standardization can constrain innovation, but partial or late standard-ization can create industry coordination problems and fragmented technology options.• ITU has a Global Standards Initiative to develop IoT stan-dards and provide an “umbrella” for other standards organizations.• Wider-focus IoT and application-specific standards groups and frameworks.• Further cooperation is needed between key standards bodies such as ITU, IEEE, IETF, IoT-specific standards organizations, and industry groups such as GSMA.• Governments can encourage further standardization through participation in stan-dards bodies (already prioritized in China, Korea and India), as well as through R&D funding and procure-ment policies.• Development of common user interface mechanisms, especially via web browsers.