As of 2020 Smart Cities are under more pressure than ever to create a safe, efficient, productive environment for citizens given the massive disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of lockdowns, travel restrictions and massive numbers of infections many local and governments have struggled to cope and in historically have turned to technology as a way of coping with challenges caused by pandemics. Pandemics can actually be a source of innovation in terms of Smart City technology dating back to more than one hundred years, as for example the city of London only installed its Victorian sewer system after an outbreak of cholera claimed 30,000 lives and modern ventilations systems quickly gained adoption due to the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic. In the era of the COVID-19 outbreak the world is again seeing innovation in the Smart City space as technologies such as robots, drones, cloud computing and biometrics are all helping to curb the spread of the virus, and many of these technologies are likely here to stay. (1)

At the same time 5G mobile networks are now being deployed at a rapid pace over much of the world, and the high bandwidth and low latency connectivity that will come with these networks is already emerging as a powerful tool which Smart Cities can use to take their service offerings to the next level. According to the GSM Association there are now 113 live 5G networks in 48 countries, with the most advanced network deployments in the world being found in the US, China, South Korea, Japan, the Gulf states, Australia, and parts of Europe. Coverage is still limited in most of these countries and while many Smart City plans were suddenly postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there still has been significant progress towards integrating 5G connectivity into Smart City solutions. (2)