As the economy opens back up, we need to look to the future.  The increasing urbanization of our society is a trend that has spanned generations.  Small and large urban community leaders facing this kind of growth can continue to limp along with temporary fixes or use the Internet of all Things (“IoT”) and smart city solutions to manage the challenges of urban growth.  

According to Wikipedia, “IoT” is a “system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction”.  As such, the IoT has the potential to alleviate many of the pressures of urbanization such as traffic congestion, parking, sanitation, energy, utilities, lighting, crime prevention, security, personal safety, the environment, and much more.  

People face these challenges every day.  As they become more aware of potential IoT-driven solutions, their speed of adoption will increase, and positive change can occur. Municipal leaders have a responsibility to serve their constituents by developing priorities around keeping people safe, ensuring infrastructure is enough to maintain and drive economic growth, and making their communities attractive places to live and work.  

Currently, ICH is built on existing internet, cloud-based centralized processing technologies. However, in 2019, we contracted with a small defense company founded in 1994.  Its mission is to lead advancements in the rapidly converging, next generation technologies in electromagnetic spectrum and assured wireless device connectivity.  By leveraging its vast experience in cognitive radio communication, wireless cyber security, and multi-sensor fusion, our partner is integrating and rapidly advancing its inventions with machine learning and artificial intelligence.  As a result, we are upgrading and positioning our ICH technology to move into the future where all the personal smart devices we carry will interact seamlessly with smart city infrastructure services in a distributed, decentralized ecosystem by anyone, anytime, and anyplace in a more secure way.  

Imagine being connected wirelessly to everything from driverless cars to scooters and public transportation to personal and home security, to paying bills and making purchases, to peer-to-peer communication, entertainment and banking…all without a middleman, interruption or slowdown of services through  a stand-alone, virtually unhackable, dynamic smart-node Spectrum radio network.  

Imagine that this independent and agile distributed mesh network operates in radio frequency bands of the ethereal Spectrum space.  That literally, a handful of special nodes can be deployed strategically around a city and form the background connectivity and ad hoc communication architecture.  That this decentralized and fractionalized architecture democratizes the Spectrum of carriers and cable companies with their single-point-of-failure vulnerability.  Imagine that it provides redundant, sensor-rich, synced data gathering and sharing and security and auditing of transactions using the blockchain.

  
Imagine being able to call for help in an emergency or disaster situation when the phone and internet are down.  Imagine keeping your personal data and credit safe from hackers and other criminals.  Imagine a community, a city, and a nation where these and other essential services are all provided on an as-needed basis and you are only charged when you use them.  We are talking about transformative technology that is better, cheaper, and safer than the over-priced subscription-based services we pay for that are built on old carrier-based delivery systems and technologies.  

As we look into the future, we also see a world of fractional transparent ownership, connectivity with the Internet of all Things, a universal rewards currency, data protection and secure, blockchain-based transactions for all commerce.  Now, just imagine that everything we have just described has already been tested and in one form or another and is currently being used by our military and certain government agencies today. Imagine looking into the future and positioning yourself to take advantage of the many opportunities that will arise when these transformative technologies are deployed into the commercial marketplace…and finally, understand that this smart city technology of the future we just described, is here now!     

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