Ningbo outlines blueprint for smart city construction
A view of Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province. [Photo/IC]
Ningbo in East China's Zhejiang province recently unveiled a guideline to boost smart city construction during the 14th Five-year Plan (2021-25) period.
According to the guideline, more than 40,000 5G base stations will be built in Ningbo by 2025, with 5G signals covering the whole city.
It will offer broadband speeds of 1,500 megabytes per second (Mbps) to those in rural areas and 2,000 Mbps in urban areas.
The city also aims to build a domestically leading AI supercomputing center and increase the application scenarios of its "city brain" to above 100.
In August 2020, Ningbo initiated a "city brain" construction project, with a total investment of 460 million yuan ($70.8 million). The "city brain" refers to a system integrating applications of smart cities, digital government, and digital public services.
The system is able to collect real-time data related to the city's operation status and present them on an over-200-square-meter screen. Currently, it has amassed a total of 10.2 billion pieces of data from 25 government departments, official data shows.
The "city brain" project was put into use on March 27.
By the end of last year, broadband access speeds in Ningbo's urban and rural areas had reached 1,000Mbps and 500Mbps. The city had constructed more than 10,000 5G base stations, with signals covering all its key commercial blocks, according to a head official from the Ningbo municipal bureau of economy and information technology.