Engineering Smart Communities

Deck: 

Telecom and Transportation Charging for Smart Cities

Fortnightly Magazine - July 2019
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To create a smart city you need to dot the i's and you need to cross the critically-important t's, telecom and transportation charging specifically. That's what these two leading engineers discuss in their PUF interviews here, Chrissy Carr on telecom and Kyle Pynn on transportation charging. Both see their fields as delivering basic enabling technologies for smart communities of any size. For example, Pynn helps utilities develop the necessary infrastructure so there can be charging stations of a range of capacities everywhere throughout their service territories.

Chrissy Carr on Telecom for Smart Cities

PUF's Steve Mitnick: What's your role at Burns & McDonnell?

Chrissy Carr: I am a registered professional electrical engineer. I serve Burns and McDonnell as a director in our Networks Integration & Automation Group, or NIA. My emphasis within electrical engineering is telecommunications, which is a great foundation for our work with smart cities. Telecom is the basis of the smart city.

PUF: What's your group like? How many people are in that group? 

Chrissy Carr: We plan, design and construct utility telecom and operational technology. Basically, anything the electric utility does, we do at Burns & McDonnell. As our group grew, we began helping with SCADA, which eventually expanded to fiber optic networks, microwave networks, and then network electronics.

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