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espite the increasing population of internet users, Indonesia still lacks proper infrastructure, hindering its goal of developing smart cities.

Imagine you can escape Jakarta’s notorious traffic jams by synchronizing your commute with green traffic lights. All of this could be done at the tip of a finger, using an app on your mobile phone.

Such convenience is already available in Australia, said Tony Field, the senior director of social innovation business at data storage company Hitachi Data Systems’ Asia Pacific region, during the Hitachi Social Innovation Forum 2016 in Tokyo in late October.

However, to implement something like that, he said a country must be ready to make a massive investment in the world of internet of things (IoT), which is still lacking in Indonesia.

The IoT basically allows every physical object to be interconnected with one another. Every digital process will generate large data sets that can be analyzed to reveal patterns and trends to increase productivity and efficiency in everyday life, including improving public safety and health care.

The analyst firm Gartner reports that by 2020 there will be more than 26 billion connected devices and the connections will be people-to-people, people-to-things and things-to-things or machine-to-machine (M2M).

International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that the global IoT market should reach the US$7.1 trillion mark by 2020.

“In the current IoT world, Indonesia has huge potential, especially in terms of public sector development. Indonesia stands right behind China, India and Australia as investors’ top pick nowadays,” Field added.

Proper infrastructure is deemed crucial to support the use of IoT technologies, especially because Indonesia seeks to develop smart cities.

Jakarta and Bandung have aspirations of becoming smart cities by 2018.

Jakarta has launched a “Jakarta Smart City” app overseeing the integration of Qlue, the administration’s crowd-sourcing web site, Waze, a 24-hour mobile traffic information and chat platform, and CROP, the application used by officials to immediately acknowledge and respond to public complaints.

Ravi Chalaka, the vice president of the Hitachi Insight Group, which is the global IoT business and strategy unit of Hitachi, said that a smart city should provide two basic things, security intelligence and operational intelligence.

He said the infrastructure procurement for a smart city should go along with the safety system, with smoke detectors, gunshot sensors and thousands of cameras installed in public areas across the city.

“Later on, all of those can be used for operational intelligence. If I have cameras looking for a problem or crime on the street, I can also look at how many cars and which directions and speed they are going.”

Meanwhile, as most of the development is still scattered, Bank Indonesia (BI) Governor Agus Martowardojo has previously called on the government to include a smart city master plan in the National Mid-Term Development Plan (RPJMN) 2015-2019.

According to Agus, the development of smart cities would be more secure if it was included in the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) road map and provided a specific budget allocation and was supported by the Communications and Information Ministry with IT resources.

Several large-scale national projects are also expected to boost IoT development in the country. The Palapa Ring project aims to lay down over 11,000 kilometers of fiber optic cables to provide the nation with faster internet.