Shaping cities through innovation

What we are after is inclusion, everyone participating in the digital revolution, and for smart cities that needs a few building blocks in place so an open ecosystem can form.

The first is connectivity. Without good connectivity nothing above it works, so we provide ubiquitous, safe and fast infrastructure across the country, whether mobile, fixed wireless or fibre. The second is platforms and data, so nobody rebuilds the same foundation over and over. IdeaMart does this for developers and IdeaBiz for enterprises, exposing basic APIs such as location, charging and messaging, along with a good many more interesting ones. The third layer is the applications, and we are engaged there without any intention of inventing them all. That should be the creativity of the crowd, the developers and the startups in this room.

On 5G, we are always at the forefront of connectivity innovation and we launched 4G first in the region. 5G is attractive and not yet commercially available here, because the spectrum has to come first. My point is that you should not wait for it. We have close to one hundred percent coverage with a very good 4G network, better than many countries, a fixed wireless proposition second to none, and 75 MHz on 2.3 GHz. 5G will add speed, lower latency and denser networks, and you can develop on what is live today. We are also lucky on price: a recent study across 230 countries put Sri Lanka seventh cheapest in the world for data, behind India, where Jio disrupted the entire market. Cheap data means you can stop worrying about using connectivity at all.

The deployed cases are unglamorous and they work. Metering: rather than reading your electricity manually, connect the meter, get the reading wirelessly and pay what you use. We have thousands of devices out and they work beautifully, and the customer also starts to see where the money actually goes, which is where the behaviour changes. Alarming: we connect ATMs so the bank knows whether the machine is up, whether the heat is too high, whether the camera watching it is working. Tracking and tracing: a device that plugs into a car, a truck or an entire fleet, including the city's garbage collection, so you learn where your vehicles are, whether they are underused, and how to optimise. Waste: a sensor in the top of a bin so the municipality routes collection to where it is actually needed rather than on a schedule. On top of that sit the more advanced things, such as the video analytics and face detection we run, which became a significant effort after the Easter attack.

On breaking bureaucracy, let me offer a positive example rather than a complaint. State pensioners used to wait for information about their pension and had to appear physically at an office every year to prove they were still entitled to it. The Department of Pensions went at the digital opportunity very proactively, and with two or three developers working like a startup inside Dialog we built, in about six to eight weeks, an application that shows every state pensioner in real time when the next pension arrives and, once it has, exactly how much with which deductions. It is becoming a hub for that segment, who are far more open to technology than people assume. So yes, bureaucracy exists. Point out the benefit, show that a small team can deliver it, and there is real willingness, and others follow.

Two things for the startups here. Use the building blocks. Do not reinvent the wheel: connectivity, platforms, data, APIs and applications already exist, and you can put yourself on top of them and go. Too many people rebuild an IoT platform that is already there, and you can connect a device to ours today. And if you are not doing your own startup, consider joining us, because we are really a set of small startups doing genuinely interesting work with more data than anyone else in the country, and if your own startup fails, consider it even more.