Shanghai speeding up smart city development

Shanghai smart city management has improved in 2020 with wider coverage and improved e-governance service, as districts and organizations continue adopting advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, city officials said today.

Shanghai’s smart city index increased to 109.77 points in 2020, 3.91 points higher than last year, according to a report released during Shanghai Smart City Week, which opened today.

Various events will be held this week to highlight smart city results, awarding top contributors, revealing AI applications and promoting digital economy development.

In the one-stop online governance platform Government Online-Offline Shanghai, more than 2,600 public services can be applied and completed online. The platform now has 108,000 applications serving 43-million people and 2.1 million enterprises, including multinationals.

The one-stop government platform covers everything from pandemic prevention and social security checks to special tax reduction applications. It shares 3.4 billion data points across different municipal government bureaus, and 25-million data points in the Yangtze River Delta region.

Pudong New Area, Xuhui and Huangpu Districts are the three “smartest” areas as they quickly adopt new technologies.

Shanghai now has 1,100 AI firms with combined revenue of more than 150-billion yuan (US$22 billion). The software and service industry’s annual revenue has surpassed 1-trillion yuan.

The city has one of the top 5G and broadband networks in the world.

Shanghai currently has 9.6 million broadband family users, with average broadband download speeds reaching 52 megabits per second (Mbps), the only Chinese city with speeds over 50 Mbps.

According to the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization, the download speed of 5G networks in the city will triple to one Gigabit per second and the family broadband download speed will double to 100 Mbps by 2023.