NBN teams with Urbis and Delos Delta to create blueprint for ‘smart’ communities

The NBN has teamed up with infrastructure consulting firms Urbis and Delos Delta to develop a strategy that ensures new developments have connectivity that will last well into the future.

Urbis, Delos Delta and NBN will work together to create a blueprint for developing ‘smarter’ communities compatible with technological networks now, and into the future

Two major infrastructure consulting firms and a government-run telco have committed to creating a tech-heavy prospectus they hope will become a blueprint for building ‘smarter’ developments.

Urbis, Delos Delta and NBN announced the new partnership, which will involve the firms developing a core tech strategy for developers and telcos to ensure new developments have connectivity that will last well into the future.

These smarter developments will monitor apartments, buildings, streets and local amenities, including parks, by collecting data to ensure future developments and renovations are made with data-led decisions.

On a simpler level, they will provide benefits to those living in the area, with some processes such as opening garage doors, controlling barbecues and receiving alerts possible via smartphones.

Urbis partner and director Clare Brown told The Australian that while the smart cities movement had been around for at least two decades, it had lost its steam of late.

“The smart cities movement or the smart tech movement started in the early 2000s, and there was a lot of hype, a lot of interest and a lot of activity,” Ms Brown said.

Honeycomb Park in Perth’s Brabham Estate is one of the first developments taking advantage of Smart Place technology. Picture: Anthony Anderson/NCA NewsWire

“There’s been a bit of a wane in recent years and it’s not that there’s disinterest, it’s just that things have come off the hype.”

Developers and telcos were now trying to figure out what the “digital needs” of new communities were, Ms Brown said.

“It’s about finding what are the digital needs for the residents, for commerce, for industry, for monitoring, protecting and enhancing the environment,” she said.

The prospectus will help developers in the greenfield stage deliver not just energy and water systems, but data connectivity by outlining expected digital infrastructure that will allow different services to be connected, including monitoring, providing security and using data to decide where new roads should be based on how community spaces are used.

“What we’re talking about is bringing an understanding at that early master planning stage,” Ms Brown said.

NBN co-executive general manager of new developments Andrew Walsh said the telco’s NBN Smart Places team would also be contributing to the prospectus.

That team is responsible for consulting and providing NBN to premises for the use of CCTV, smart benches, smart bins, public wi-fI and wireless charging.

Mr Walsh said there was a hope that while developers would initially front the cost of infrastructure, local government would also contribute and foot the bill for ongoing services.

“On the NBN network today there are hundreds of different retail service providers all eager to sell productivity services either to developers and eventually to the councils who would be running these technologies into the future,” he said.

He said there would also be an opportunity for further academics and the interested parties to contribute to the Accelerating Smarter Development for Australia prospectus in early 2025.