CITY OF THE MONTH
Steve drinks in the sights of wannabe smart city Singapore – and goes for a ride in a driverless golf buggy
Steve Cassidy finds himself in wannabe smart city Singapore, where he ponders on the presence of 31 different ISPs selling what is fundamentally the same product.
Being in Singapore on Star Wars day has more impact than it might in other places. This has both a simple and a complex cause and, as I’m sure you can guess, I do like my complex causes. The simple bit is that Lucasfilm has a Singapore office (in the “Sandcrawler building”, inevitably) and therefore a few props from the movies are easy to grab for an impromptu street exhibition.
The more complicated cause is that the Singaporeans have a huge interest and investment in “the future”, which means they’re almost inevitably going to be sci-fi geeks. Much to the amazement of our visiting press pack, this enthusiasm went far enough for the Supertree sculptures in the Gardens by the Bay ( pcpro.link/ 275gard) to be temporarily converted into the largest “light sabres” in the world, with a collection of stalls, experiences and photo-ops adorning their bases. If you were completely taken up in the event then you too could queue for 20 minutes in 30-degree heat and 90% humidity, to be pictured hugging a very tall man who’d spent many hours standing there in a full-body Chewbacca suit.
Now, I like the odd space opera, of course, but the party I was in wasn’t just there for the shindigs. We were supposed to be seeing what the Singapore government’s approach to smart cities looks like, and in doing so pass on to any potential business partners just how this makes everything Singaporean ideal for business and a benchmark for civic pride, social service and academic advancement. I should say upfront that their target was certainly attained – if anything, over-attained – while at the same time raising issues about how technology is taken up by governments and how difficult things get if you’re an early adopter.
Take a look at my picture below. Note the Star Wars robot thing and then let your eye roam over the Marina Bay Sands hotel, which is the three towers in the background. Despite the fact that Star Wars depicts a culture with a higher level of technology than ours, it’s now getting on for four decades old as a work of imagination, and the robot machine rather pales into obscurity beside the astonishing size, design, achievement and style of Marina Bay Sands. You can see all the facts and figures at pcpro.link/275mar, but here’s a taster: 2,561 rooms, 1,300,000sq ft exhibition centre, and the world’s largest atrium casino.
There’s a grubby commercial overtone to a hotel/casino run by a Las Vegas consortium business, but the same desire to make money underlies the Star Wars franchise – whereas the outlook of the Singapore government, as expressed in its pitches, couldn’t be more civic. From several days of conversations and presentations, it’s clear that you can’t run a completely converged online town unless you can be reasonably sure that everyone has access. You can’t do that without far-sighted administrators and a pretty good war chest of cash, because
there’s just no escape from someone having to pull many kilometres of fibre per building, shift many tonnes of furniture, and screw many wall-plates into the concrete.
From the description by one chap, now mentoring university startups but previously an administrator of the fibre rollout, it’s important to allow for Singaporeans being a grumpy, demanding and awkward lot. Which may go some way to explain why the dark fibre in each apartment block (there are thousands, mostly tending towards the enormous end of the scale) may well be owned by the government, but Singapore has 31 different ISPs.
This brings me to the punch line. It’s all the same fibre and (unlike the UK) it doesn’t go very far before it dives inside the national infrastructure through the same access point, irrespective of which ISP you choose, so how can those 31 companies possibly differentiate, compete or even get people to make a decision at all?
We were supposed to be hearing about startup incubation, but the guy in charge of that department of the university had been in charge of the fibre rollout, so as soon as it was my turn with the questions, I went boots-in. It turned out this was his favourite subject too: he confessed that nobody had really predicted the huge spread of firms that arose once Singapore was fully fibred. Some emphasise low latency and easy communication between groups, to give gamers what they need. Others are biased towards low-cost and minimal services, to suit the older consumer. Some are very business orientated: however you could change the list of services provided by an ISP, they tried it, all in a tiny city-state with the population of Switzerland.
This was meant to be a smart cities tour, but there was leakage. Star Wars got its look in (my sympathy goes out to the guy in the Wookie costume). We had demonstrations at governmentsponsored business incubators, meetings about how Singapore’s own government websites engage with local developers (direct hiring, if you’re interested), trips to schools and universities… I don’t think I’ve spent so long without touching an actual computer in my entire working life.
Coming back from Singapore in the comfort of an Airbus A380’s lower deck, I was pondering how to sum up the visit. There are some signs of early-adopter syndrome – the giant steel gantries that implement variable road pricing by displaying costs on dotty old screens, hanging above the traffic, are an unmissable indication of this problem – and the mixture of public versus private in Singapore is a funhouse mirror of the mixture in the UK, made worse by the Britishpattern mains power sockets and the fact they drive on the left, like we do.
Lots of things seem easy for tech types in Singapore, but you have to remember this is a city-state drowning in cash, run by an ex-coder. It’s almost as if you’re in Bill Gates’ Airbnb annexe – you can’t see the money directly, but its effects are all around you. It’s very difficult to come to a conclusion about the relevance of the programmes when the population is already used to government by edict rather than plebiscite.
What I needed was a comparison – and when it comes to comparisons, smart cities are difficult. Barcelona springs to mind – similar to Singapore in scale, funding, intellectual investment and readiness to get things done. But my next smart cities contact wasn’t Barcelona; it was Kigali.
Feel free to look that up. If implementing pervasive Wi-Fi or connected cars appears challenging in Singapore, imagine what those challenges look like in Kigali.
Inmarsat – the global maritime communication specialists – had done a lot of work in helping to put various smart city-related infrastructure into one of the world’s poorest and most landlocked capital cities. I don’t have the real numbers in front of me, but I suspect that Kigali’s smart city budget is about the same as Singapore’s motorway central-reservation landscaping budget. The priorities of the two cities couldn’t be more different, and it becomes fairly clear when you look at the level of infrastructure investment in Kigali – incidentals such as the likelihood of volcanic eruptions, lahars (boiling mud flows) and so on – that, actually, it makes perfect sense for a satellite communications business to get involved.
Kigali’s uses for smart city standards and implementations aren’t on the same topics as Singapore’s, but they’re trying to make use of the same standards. A CCTV camera on a chaotic and vital interchange in Kigali has the same image formats, IP addressing context and data transmission characteristics as one mounted on a road-pricing gantry or skyscraper in downtown Singapore. Indeed, this is meant to be the advantage of letting our cities get smart, by being exposed to the consumer grade standards that have put cheap technology into the hands of millions.
There’s a vast, overwhelming “however” in the works here. One of the demos around smart transport in Singapore was of relatively standard cars and vans, zooming along in a highly connected environment. Each car spoke Wi-Fi to a lot of lamp-post mounted emitters. The majority of the
“Things seem easy for tech types here, but you have to remember this is a city drowning in cash, run by an ex-coder ”
traffic was, I guess, second-order safety data: lots of different alarms trying to tell you about potentially invisible pedestrians up ahead (detected by a separate mega-cloud of motion detection CCTV, one assumes). They talked about proximity alarms, and about the challenges of what happens to a Wi-Fi network with lots of overlapping cells, servicing lots of fast-moving vehicles that could be streaming video from a rider (no drivers here) in one car, to a rider in another.
This isn’t a benefit of consumer standards in smart city wide-area networks; it’s a nightmare. I guess if you’re sitting with nothing to do because your car is doing all the driving, then your car might as well be your boudoir, gym, posing stand… and the best thing to do with your transport time would then be to hang out on Snapchat or Instagram, throwing poses. Remember, the other half of this demo was about delivering better-quality alert data to the driver. They’d have to, of course, if the other stuff coming into the driving environment is a kind of nearby driver’s Tinder feed.
There’s absolutely no hard and fast requirement for the best – and, therefore, also the worst – of consumer technology and data to intrude into networks with important work to do. Worrying about balancing off the relative importance of streamed video with driver-safety data, all in the same Wi-Fi pool of roaming addresses, is simply looking at the problem the wrong way around.
Here, Kigali has a lesson to teach Singapore. Talking to Inmarsat is inspired thinking, despite the city being about as landlocked as it’s possible to get, because Inmarsat has the necessary skills here. It packages up standard message formats and protocols and ships them over satellite links, where the flow of data is almost the same – but not quite - as it is over regular Ethernet or fibre. Nobody is demanding that satellites dangle great long skeins of fibre to the surface so that their message transmission fits well with existing implementations; the case for a “non standard” link is easily made.
Likewise, the case for a diverse collection of internally standard networks is well illustrated by Singapore’s 31 ISPs, which all share the same infrastructure and pass traffic that physical neighbours have no idea is occupying the same fibre. Gamer and granny, migrant worker and business person – it all flows side by side, courtesy of a key realisation: just because IP packets make up the net, doesn’t mean only IP packets are to be used forever more.
And as soon as I returned home from Singapore, this lesson was driven home, only far more uncomfortably: the WannaCry worm took out large swathes of the NHS computing portfolio, and it did it by being let loose on large, internally undivided, open traffic networks that permit the free passage of Microsoft SMB file server traffic to and from any machine in the LAN, whether or not it’s a file server.
Before the leakage of the NSA infiltration toolkit that formed the basis of WannaCry, this looked like a reasonable design decision. But it took hackers just over a week to figure out how to release a live payload using this intrusion method. After WannaCry – the effects of which were far greater outside the UK than within – everyone’s looking at large-scale traffic management and control with new eyes. Could the answer be found by examining approaches such as those taken in Singapore?
The Xbox driverless golf cart
One of the diversionary visits on the Singapore tour was to a university that promised a ride in a driverless vehicle. Visions of cyber-controlled Teslas danced in my head: what I got was a couple of things that look like magnified versions of a toddler’s toy.
Since our visit was in the wet season, with instant heat prostration a realistic prospect merely while waiting for a bus, there was a rush for the fully enclosed cable-car-buggy thing, which left me perspiring gently on the fibreglass seats of the other, golf-cart looking job. It was rather unfinished, with hatches open and red LEDs visible in the depths of the housing. Sitting on the bench seat was a game controller, possibly from an Xbox 360. It was hooked up to a much-abused lead, disappearing into the stack of industrial PC casings under the bench. I took a short look and then went for my camera – but by the time I turned around, the controller was back under the hatch and everything was smiles and chit-chat.
From the point of view of getting a coherent story together on the state of driverless car research in Singapore, I was scuppered: this was going to be more about saving face, than about what you really want to find out, which is about the challenges faced by someone working in this field. I’m quite sure there were some top-notch war stories on debugging the emergency stop routine by sitting on a slippery fibreglass set in a golf cart, clutching at an Xbox controller – but because I was part of an “official party”, a different, non-developer value system applied. The kind of value system where everything is fine, nothing has to be hacked in response to painful lessons learned, and there’s certainly never anybody helping the driving AI to avoid the street sign by waggling a gamepad joystick.
So I had the privilege of watching the air-conditioned buggy womble about the campus driveway, shuffling its four-wheel steering system at about 5km/hr in a series of dock/ undock, start/stop moves designed to not upset any of the passengers. Someone said that the buggy was actually from France, and that this was only a software project. My response went unspoken, but I’m still firmly convinced that this whole show would be far more interesting if the people encountering the processing, control and error-recovery issues in the development process weren’t so bound up by a code of silence that they couldn’t actually show us the lessons they were learning.
“Just because IP packets make up the internet, doesn’t mean that only IP packets are to be used forever more”