In the mobile industry, some developments are just inevitable. It’s only a question of time before the right mix of technologies, demand, and agents of change turn inevitable innovations into market reality. I was reminded of this while attending a recent webinar [1] organized by the Transport Data Initiative Forum. This featured stories about pilot projects in several UK regions to apply ‘IoT’ data to tackle a variety of what might be termed smart city applications.
Several of these pilots involved applications built with mobile network operator data, provided by the UK’s O2. Pilot projects involved several municipalities. Each of them focused on a local need (e.g., road maintenance, environmental monitoring etc.) and each built applications using data from a range of their municipal sensors and data sources. In several cases, they combined their local data assets with mobile network operator data.
I recall discussing this inevitability with a mobile operator in the UK, around 2017. The challenge in those days was to persuade different parties about the value of sharing data across organizational and commercial boundaries. A related challenge was the need to explore collaborative business models based on the equitable sharing of rewards.
