Using smart pumps to help deliver universal access to safe and affordable drinking water

It is estimated that broken water pumps impact 62 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Over the last 20 years, broken handpumps have represented US$1·2–1·5 billion of lost investment in this region, with 30–40% of rural water systems failing prematurely. While the contributory factors are complex and multi-faceted, the authors consider that improved post-construction monitoring strategies for remote water projects, which rely on smart pumps to monitor operational performance in place of physical site visits, may address some of these problems and help reduce the heavy time and resource demands on stakeholders associated with traditional monitoring strategies. As such, smart pumps could play a significant role in improving project monitoring and might subsequently help deliver universal access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030, which constitutes one of the key targets of United Nations sustainable development goal 6 and is embedded in some national constitutions

A survey of 5G technologies: regulatory, standardization and industrial perspectives

In recent years, there have been significant developments in the research on 5th Generation (5G) networks. Several enabling technologies are being explored for the 5G mobile system era. The aim is to evolve a cellular network that is intrinsically flexible and remarkably pushes forward the limits of legacy mobile systems across all dimensions of performance metrics. All the stakeholders, such as regulatory bodies, standardization authorities, industrial fora, mobile operators and vendors, must work in unison to bring 5G to fruition. In this paper, we aggregate the 5G-related information coming from the various stakeholders, in order to i) have a comprehensive overview of 5G and ii) to provide a survey of the envisioned 5G technologies; their development thus far from the perspective of those stakeholders will open up new frontiers of services and applications for next-generation wireless networks. Keywords: 5G, ITU, Next-generation wireless network