For years, teachers at Sunderland’s Hudson Road Primary had two choices: avoid using the school’s painfully slow Wi-Fi, or put up with an unreliable connection.
"It was having a huge impact on lessons," says headteacher Cathy Westgate. "A lot of the things that tech-savvy staff want to do now, like using videos, like doing live streaming…we couldn’t do any of that. It was really frustrating."
Just as that frustration started to peak, Westgate was approached by Sunderland Council’s chief executive, Patrick Melia, who asked if the school wanted to be included in the city’s "5G-ready communications ring" — a network of antennas and receivers placed on tower blocks to beam fast, free Wi-Fi across Sunderland.
The upgrade, which took place in January, meant Hudson Road went from being unable to watch a single YouTube video to seeing speeds of up to 990Mbps.
Ernest Doku, tech expert at price comparison website Uswitch.com, said those speeds were "incredibly fast" compared to the country-wide average of 64Mbps.
“Being able to reach speeds of 990Mbps will make a noticeable difference to students in Sunderland, with frustrations around buffering, uploading of coursework and slow loading pages becoming a thing of the past," he says.
Such initiatives last week helped Sunderland win the crown of Britain’s "smartest city" as part of a national competition organised by the global initiative ‘Digital Leaders’.
Sunderland, which has long had one of the poorest ultrafast broadband penetration rates in the UK, has shown just quickly 5G and faster internet can unlock educational opportunities and financial rewards.
Alongside Hudson Road primary, the city’s ‘communications ring’ has made 5G speeds available on Sunderland’s main shopping street, the city centre’s Keel Square, the seafront and into the community rooms of residential tower blocks.
What is 5G? | At a glance
Boost to business
The city has also started making use of a £4.9m government funding grant to boost the local car industry by installing 5G at Nissan’s local manufacturing plant – which is one of the largest in the UK.
In partnership with local companies, universities and the North East Automotive Alliance, Sunderland City Council will use a private road network to test an autonomous 40-tonne HGV without a safety driver.
"Next generation infrastructure, both fibre to the premise, really fast speeds and 5G, will attract a whole raft of new businesses and services and will help us work with the technology community to build solutions that haven’t yet been invented," says Liz St Louis, assistant director of smart cities at Sunderland City Council.
Around the world, there is huge variety in how cities interpret the challenge of becoming "smart". Robin Knowles, CEO of DigiLeaders,acknowledges the idea is nebulous but, for him, it’s about "leveraging technology and data or social and economic good".
David Dunn, chief executive of Sunderland Software City, believes Sunderland’s success can be traced back to its willingness to be experimental and to create opportunities for tech companies in the UK.
For instance, when the city wanted to use technology to help its older population live more independently and reduce social services costs, the council asked the tech industry how it could help.
Southampton-based Nquiring Minds and Wiltshire-based Cascade3d responded by launching a trial, in collaboration with the council’s social care teams, in which sensors were placed in the homes of the elderly and vulnerable.
Over the past 18 months, these sensors have been installed on doors to help people with early onset dementia who are starting to wander. They have also been installed on fridges and kettles to make sure people are eating and drinking. Data from these sensors can then alert family members via an app if something unusual is happening.
Smart surveillance?
However, while Sunderland says the 300 households in the assistive technology trial volunteered to take part, such projects have raised flags among privacy campaigners.
"While smart cities sound good on paper, in practice we are watching our cities turning into increasingly surveilled space, where there is no longer such a thing as strolling anonymously down the streets,” says Privacy International.
In Newcastle — DigiLeaders’ smart city of the year in 2019 — technology generates 10,000 "observations" from the city every minute, tracking residents’ movements, the pollution or the weather.
Philip James, Professor of Urban Data at Newcastle University, says the city’s open data platform means researchers can use that information to draw conclusions about how the area can be improved. But in other places, this data ends up siloed and owned not by the local authority, but by the tech company that built the smart city platform.
"I don’t think there’s a joined up approach," he says. "If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up with every single city, municipality and town building its own, or buying its own Smart City platform."
He added that local authorities should avoid the marketing-hype that surrounds smart cities while staying wary of the tech "vultures" keen to sell products that over-promise but offer little substance. But, as cities like Sunderland have shown, the right use of technology can boost vital services, giving a range of communities a significant online upgrade.
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