The pandemic has hit hard the budgets of local authorities that are needed for smart city investments. This year Alphabet Inc.-backed Sidewalk Labs Inc. pulled out of a billion-dollar smart city project on Toronto’s waterfront. Cisco cast a wider net of partnerships working with locations in various countries to help support their smart city projects. “Smart cities are a hard sell," said Christopher Reberger, a former director at Cisco who has analyzed the economics of smart cities. The return on investment can be hard to quantify, he said, and stitching together disparate smart city technologies can appear daunting.

Source: Mint December 29, 2020 06:22 UTC