AT&T’s Long-Term Vision: More Connected Cities
LAS VEGAS–AT&T is cementing its position as the very first truly post-smartphone wireless carrier at CES this week, with a slew of announcements around clever health, wise cities and clever, well, everything but phones.
It’s not that AT&T doesn’t have phones. The company announced three fresh rugged Kyocera phones yesterday. But while AT&T is still the second-biggest wireless carrier in the nation, all of its postpaid growth last quarter was in things other than phones.
So AT&T didn’t bring a phone manufacturer on stage at its developer summit here today–it brought Ericsson, to talk about brainy cars and wise cities. And while this is a big deal for AT&T, and it may result in millions of devices getting little AT&T modules in them, there isn’t much being announced today for individuals to buy.
Take brainy health. AT&T announced a network-connected glucose meter, the YOFiMeter, which transmits blood sugar data to doctors, and a “remote patient monitoring” system that lets sick people take their own measurements and transmit them wirelessly to their doctors.
But the YOFiMeter needs FDA approval, and all of these e-health solutions require doctors to get on board. Elaborate government regulations (which predate Obamacare) around electronic medical records have made the entire medical IT area a slow-moving swamp of discontent, according to a latest editorial in FierceEMR.
Then there’s wise cities. AT&T announced a sophisticated alliance of a entire bunch of big players to get city services on line, with things like brainy water and electric current meters, real-time infrastructure monitoring and gunfire-detection technology. Many of these things have existed for decades–I wrote about ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection technology, in 2000–but AT&T is attempting to work on the painful task of knitting them all together into coherent systems with devices like a “Brainy City Network Operation Center.”
The benefit to AT&T is visible: if it can get its own modules into every traffic light and trash can in Dallas, well, that’s a lot of connections.
Related
But once again, AT&T is attempting to budge a enormous, strong ship that has a lot of different skippers. In the fine longform chunk “Why Fresh York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks,” The Atlantic looks at the extreme difficulty of getting a hidebound city agency to upgrade 100-year-old technology without shutting down a 24-hour subway system.
I don’t mean to be a finish downer about AT&T’s efforts here. We’re going to be hearing a lot about e-health and wise cities over the next few years, as we’ve been hearing about them for the past several years. But it’s a slow build and a mighty lift to get there, and we may not see concrete results for several more years. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
PCMag.com’s lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than nine years with PCMag. He’s the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web showcase and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the Big black cock, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta. Segan is also a numerous award-winning travel writer, having contributed. More »
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