Learn About JBG Smith and the Nation’s First 5G Smart City at Scale in National Landing

Listen to an insightful discussion about JBG Smith's Digital Infrastructure Platform being deployed at National Landing , VA directly from JBGS' Vardahn Chaudhry, Vice President Smart Cities & Digital Infrastructure and Adam Rashid, Senior Vice President .

U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) said “I am thrilled to see this collaboration of leading private sector organizations to promote 5G deployment. American competitiveness in the deployment of 5G networks – and innovation in the emerging technologies 5G unlocks – remain key to our national and economic security interest.  As a proud Virginian, I am excited to see National Landing emerge as our first 5G community – and I look forward to wider deployment across the Commonwealth. This collaboration can be a blueprint for how digital infrastructure is deployed, and I am heartened by the prospects of the innovation this may unlock to advance our country’s competitiveness globally.”

 National Landing is a submarket nearly the size of Williamsburg Brooklyn, and an existing office density greater than downtown Austin, TX.  The submarket is in Arlington, VA and is home to Amazon’s HQ2 and Virginia Tech’s $1 billion STEM innovation campus. At full build-out National Landing will consist of over 30 million SF of mixed-use real estate, including office, residential, retail, public parks, and multi-modal transportation options. JBGS owns or controls nearly 70% of the existing and developable real estate in this submarket. 

JBGS is deploying a robust digital infrastructure platform across National Landing that is purpose-built to stimulate innovation.

National Landing digital infrastructure platform will be the first of its kind in the nation and will be a blueprint for innovation districts across the globe going forward. The component parts of the platform include:

• Fiber – Redundant/ubiquitous fiber with pre-wired fiber connections to nearly all buildings, public areas, and street furniture.
• Edge Data Centers – Two urban edge data centers, acting as easy on-ramps to the cloud, locations for edge computing, and hubs for carriers & data aggregation.
• Ubiquitous outdoor & Indoor 5G (MmWave and Mid-band) – True 5G at the mid and high band, allowing for Massive IoT Connection, Multi-gigabit speeds, and ultra-reliable low latency across the submarket.
• Private Licensed Spectrum – JBGS controls 70MHz of private CBRS mid-band spectrum and will offer it to innovative users to enable private 5G networks for testing and scaling products on private secure cellular wireless networks.

Taken together, the JBGS digital infrastructure platform enables and unlocks the potential of the 4th Industrial Revolution and industries including Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Cloud/Edge computing.

While other innovation districts have focused on building clusters for traditional “placed-based” innovation, in National Landing we are combining traditional place-based innovation with the digital infrastructure required for the industries that are at the forefront of our nation’s economic growth, competitiveness, and national security.

With JBGS' digital infrastructure platform as the foundation for innovation for industry 4.0, JBGS is inviting, creating, and curating partnerships with key technology ecosystem participants to accelerate innovation in this city of th

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Would you like to be a guest on our growing podcast?

If you have an intriguing, thought provoking topic you'd like to discuss on our podcast, please contact our host Jim Frazer or Our Producer Tom Cabot

View all the episodes here: https://thesustainabilitypodcast.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Jim Frazer  

Welcome to another episode of the smart city Podcast. Today I'm very pleased to be joined by Adam Rashid head of smart cities and digital infrastructure at JBG Smith, as well as Vardahn Chaudhry, Vice President of smart cities and digital infrastructure at JBG. Smith. Gentlemen, thank you for coming today. How are you?

Adam Rashid  

Great. Thanks for having us, Jim. Thanks, Jim.

Jim Frazer  

Let me ask both of you and feel free to chime in in any order. Your what brought each of you to this smart city space.

Adam Rashid  

Yeah, I'll This is Adam, I'll get us get us started here. I think my path to Smart Cities is a bit kind of untraditional. Most of my career was in real estate finance. Prior to joining JBG Smith, I spent about six years doing real estate private equity, traditional investing and joined JBG Smith about three and a half years ago where I was fortunate enough to co found our Smart Cities practice here. And honestly, I had a fortunate meeting with an executive that was in the telecommunication space that was really raving about 5g and how it was really going to kind of change the built environment and you know the world in his from his perspective, then when I got to JBG realized that most of our holdings are in a place called National landing, which we'll talk a lot about. And because of our scale of ownership and control, we really had the ability to roll out digital infrastructure and 5g much faster and more seamlessly than kind of many other places. And so, you know, brought this thesis to the firm, that we could be one of the first to kind of have true 5g at scale, and rollout robust digital infrastructure to really drive our core business of owning, operating and building commercial real estate. And was fortunate enough to kind of get the backing of our senior team here. And, you know, three and a half years later, where we're off to the races, you know, building the US is first 5g Smart City at scale.

Jim Frazer  

Well, that's, that's fascinating. Vardhan, what brought you to the smart city space?

Vardahn Chaudhry  

Sure. So Jim, my, my path actually started back at jpg about two years ago. So I joined Adam and team at JBG. Back just before the pandemic started. And prior to that I was working at a consulting firm at Accenture for about a decade. And the majority of that time I was focused on this, you know, an amorphous, I'd say at times concept of smart cities. So we started on that journey back in 2011 2012, when the term was in its infancy, and I was fortunate enough to have that have had an opportunity as a consultant to travel the world and work with cities, municipalities, and then eventually mixed use developers and owner operators to try to crack the nut of what we met with smart cities and how to actually, you know, change the way urban environments were built from the ground up. And was fortunate enough to join Adam and the team in the JBG journey as a consultant. And one thing led to the next Adam said, hey, why don't you jump over the fence? And I was I was thrilled to do that. So the reason I did is because what we have here national landing is, as you'll hear from Adam, frankly, the first true Smart City, certainly in the country, but arguably the world so we're really excited to build what we have here.

Jim Frazer  

Wow, that's great. Um, you know, for those of our listeners who might not know who JBG Smith is perhaps let's start with a little background about the company and then their role in the smart city ecosystem.

Adam Rashid  

Yeah. So JBG Smith, we are a publicly traded real estate investment trust. We're based here in the Washington DC metro area, exclusively focused on building Mix. used Urban development here in the Washington DC Metro. And you know, our current form is JBG. Smith is really a product of a merger of two companies. So the JBG companies’ long history in Washington, DC of urban placemaking, and real estate private equity investing, where, you know, we've physically transformed many emerging neighborhoods from the ballpark to Shaw to 14th Street. And then in late in 2017, we, we merged with Vornado out of out of New York City, who had a large holdings in the Washington DC area, and we spun out a new company called JBG. Smith. And as a part of that spin merge, as we call it, came with it, this area that we call national landing, which is where the majority of our company's value is held. And it's really kind of three historic submarkets, Pentagon City, Crystal City Potomac Yard, kind of all in the Arlington and Alexandria areas of Virginia, so directly across the river from Washington, DC and adjacent to the Pentagon. And we have the, you know, fortunate place to have won the Amazon HQ to pursuit and so we were actually building Amazon's second headquarters for them. And then we're also building a new innovation campus for Virginia Tech, which is a billion-dollar campus focus on STEM innovation. And in the middle of those two phenomenal acres, is where most of our holdings are where we own or control about 70% of the existing and developable real estate, which again, gives us tremendous size and control in the sub market, which is, you know, roughly the size of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and with an office density, the size of downtown Austin, Texas today. So that's, that's where we play. And that's really where we are kind of developing to badass point this, this Smart City, which is wanting to be the first in the nation. And Nevada, you want to talk a little bit about kind of what our role is kind of in the smart city space in this place. Well, before

Jim Frazer  

before we even go there, just to outline that that development area there is some new transportation is a big part of smart cities. I believe there are some transit lines. And of course, I believe a National Airport is right in the proximity as well, isn't

Vardahn Chaudhry  

it? Yep, that's right. And, you know, we sort of think of this place as being anchored by three phenomenal anchors, and having incredible access to transportation, like you said, and so those three anchors for us, we sort of like in this place to be anchored by on the one hand, the Pentagon, national landings, it's directly adjacent, on the south side of the Pentagon, anchored by Amazon HQ to and Virginia Tech's billion dollar Innovation Campus. And then on the eastern side of the neighborhood, as you just mentioned, Jim, were tucked in directly next to Reagan. And in fact, among several billions of dollars, you know, upwards of $6 billion of physical infrastructure improvements, includes a pedestrian bridge, where, over time, we're going to actually have a bridge that will connect our neighborhood to national landings, you'll have walkability from, from an urban place and national ending to the airport, it will be the first and only of its kind in the country, and actually second only to Tokyo, as far as a true urban airport goes.

Jim Frazer  

Oh, that's, that's great. I never liked taking that cab ride over to the hotel across the highway. Yeah. So, um, I mean, we've got a perspective of the geographical confines of national landing. But you know, what, what really were the, what are the smart city goals? Then, you know, and who are all the stakeholders? What are you attempting to achieve there?

Adam Rashid  

Yeah. So as kind of real estate owners and operators, we have kind of a fundamental maxim that real estate houses the economy, and kind of our core business at JBG is, as I said, owning and operating and building real estate. And so we started to study and say, What is what do we think is going to be the greatest driver of kind of economic growth over the next in the coming decades and really aligned on kind of the growth of industry 4.0 What's happening in IoT, what's happening in artificial intelligence what's happening and, you know, Advanced High Capacity compute and quantum I'm computing, robotics, things of that nature. And we quickly realized that those type of innovations really need purpose built digital infrastructure. And equally as important if we want to attract the companies that are going to build the future. They don't have that at scale. They don't have the infrastructure that's required to build kind of these new technologies at scale. And so we tried to look at smart city from a little bit of a different lens, not to say what's going to be the next whiz bang use case. In fact, when we started this, we said like, no, no parlor tricks. We said, What do what can we do kind of as our as our role here, kind of as orchestrator, and, and curator of this, this this city, what can we do to give innovators all the tools that they need to build a future to build kind of the next generation of IoT to build kind of truly deep neural nets for AI, to have all the compute that's necessary to have kind of autonomy, whether it be autonomous bots, or cars, and we really centered in around this digital infrastructure platform that left to its own devices, the market just wouldn't produce? Yeah,

Vardahn Chaudhry  

I think that's a really key point that Adam just made there. You know, many smart cities, as we look around the globe have, by and large, let's say, approach smart cities with the use cases or technology solutions first. And you see the usual suspects of smart lighting, solutions, parking, smart metering, on waterpower, and a whole host of other solutions, even in the transportation space. But what we don't see, I think, you know, on the domestic or global stage is any sort of Smart City at scale. And, you know, to Adams point, we are not in the position to crystal ball or forecast, you know what technology solutions are the best for any urban environment. But we do know that what we have here is an incredible density of control at scale. And we have a mini city here, it's a microcosm of any urban place, given its mix of uses availability of transit, the fact that we span two municipalities in Arlington County and the city of Alexandria, we have a live fire urban environment. And what we what we're building is, we think the first of its kind infrastructure platform to basically serve as the foundation and sort of, you know, as we like to say, the easy button for innovators to come to this neighborhood, test, build, build, test and scale new products and services, that that then you know, will define smart cities of the future.

Jim Frazer  

Well, that is fascinating. Because, you know, in the early days with smart cities, you're absolutely correct that the low hanging fruit was thought to be led streetlight conversions or backhaul for the metering network. But it really wasn't foundational. And you know, here at ARC, we actually adopt the perspective of the Smart Cities Council where there's nine vertical application areas that public agencies tend to support. But more importantly, there's seven cross cutting technologies. And you know, the foundational ones are the ones that I'm seeing in your data infrastructure platform. Predominantly, they are in edge computing, the actual conductivity and then and then your all your back-office business intelligence. So you really need that before you start deciding what IoT sensors are you putting out there? Or, or what application should I dream up? You really do need that foundational technology before you do much else.

Adam Rashid  

Yeah, no, we couldn't agree more. I mean, look, we take it from the perspective taking a lot of stuff that we've we jpg as a company have done from a physical placemaking perspective and bringing them to the digital world. We like to liken ourselves to digital Placemakers where in the physical world we are, you know, we make curate a streetscape. And, you know, pick the best restaurant tours, the best hotel years, you know, the right mix of apartments and office space, but we're not kind of In the Kitchen kind of creating that meal. And we want to try to take a similar perspective from a digital perspective, where we wanted to give innovators to Ron's point kind of the easy button and everything that they need to become and be the best innovators that they can and so similar to the way that arc looks at it, we said look These things are foundational. You need these, these foundational technologies. And that's why we really, you know, hone in on the idea that this is true infrastructure. This is what the future will be built upon, to deliver kind of the next generation of use case. And we don't know what that use case is, we don't really want to prescribe what that use case is, we want national landing to become more of a rainforests where people have everything that they need, and that innovation becomes organic, and some use case, the way that Uber changed our lives, is developed here and will ultimately change our lives. And in this kind of new, you know, industry 4.0 Fourth Industrial Revolution, we want to be that place that, that gives innovators the tools to be as creative as possible.

Jim Frazer  

And that's a great, you know, let's for the technologists in the audience, let's walk through slowly some of the some of the technologies that are embedded in your comprise your digital infrastructure platform. So let's talk about fiber. What does fiber do for this community?

Vardahn Chaudhry  

Sure. So Jim, maybe if I could, I'll just take a quick step back. And they'll go ahead, would it be helpful for us to maybe bounce through the component parts of our stack, you know, at a higher level, and then we can drill in

Jim Frazer  

before we drill down? That's, that's a great place to go. Go ahead.

Vardahn Chaudhry  

So Adam, do you maybe want to walk through the overall stack, and then I can help drill into the details? Yeah, for

Adam Rashid  

sure. So we've kind of the five or six components, if you will, of the platform, and it really starts at the fiber layer. So we are laying redundant and ubiquitous dark fiber, north south east west, across every street connecting every piece of street furniture, every one of our buildings, even every one of our tenant suites, with fiber with dark fiber, kind of across the entirety of geography. All of those fibers terminate into centrally located edge data centers. And they really become kind of the hub in this hub and spoke topology. They become places for carrier points of presence, they also become kind of the house for the next generation of compute, whether that is Mac mobile edge compute, or we're working with other partners to bring high capacity supercomputer to the sub market working with partners to bring cloud based quantum computing to the market, they become these on ramps for the cloud. So they really become kind of the hub or the brains, if you will, kind of the other platform above those two wireline assets and allows for really wireless to flourish and kind of flourish in new ways. You know, first is kind of our public outdoor 5g. And so we made an announcement this past summer to bring on AT&T as a foundational partner to deliver ubiquitous outdoor 5g at the millimeter wave in most areas and sub six ubiquitously kind of throughout national landing, which again, will make us kind of this first smart 5g Smart City at scale, where we'll have kind of true 5g kind of across this entirety of national landing. We also have a commitment to defend our 5g, recognizing that, you know, just the physics of 5g, you know, doesn't allow for to permeate kind of surfaces as well. And so we're investing in kind of neutral host infrastructure to make sure that we have the rec, the requisite infrastructure to make sure that 5g is kind of throughout all of our in-building settings. We're also working to make sure that kind of Wi Fi, at the Wi Fi 60. And eventually seven is kind of ubiquitous, we say kind of from cellphone to sidewalk, and we'll have kind of a managed Wi Fi solution across the entirety of the geography. And then finally, about two summers ago, we purchased from the FCC, and its auction CBRs spectrum. So we are the largest owner of private access licenses CVRs in Arlington, and the second largest holder in the city of Alexandria, the two municipalities where national landing is and so we have our own private cellular spectrum. And we bought the spectrum not to become not to become a telecom but again, in this idea that we want to give innovators the easy button. And so you can come to us you can come to national landing and how have everything that you need to develop the next generation of use case, kind of with a one stop shop that is JBG Smith to help you from kind of the fiber through the actual airwaves. And again, this is what we believe is necessary for true innovation and industry 4.0.

Jim Frazer  

Wow, this is a substantial undertaking. Where are you in this development process? Is this in a conceptual phase? Or have you laid fiber? Have you built

Vardahn Chaudhry  

buildings? So we're absolutely in in full build and sort of construction and implementation mode right now, which is really exciting for us, Jim, you know, we really took the better part of 2024 planning and strategy, the better part of 2021 bringing on foundational partners and closing on really innovative transactions and structuring deals. And now in 2022, we are full steam ahead putting shovels in the ground and implementing with the ambitious goal of having our first deployment of 5g online later this year, which will obviously necessitate our fiber connections as well as runs without fiber to be connected and have the end Lex are at the edge data centers as Adam described, be online. You know, starting at the fiber layer. One thing that is exciting and I think ought to be a blueprint for other neighborhoods of our elk is a really innovative public private partnership that we struck with Arlington County. Arlington County is one of the two municipalities that national landing straddles. And that county was at a lot of foresight, yes, five to seven years ago, they laid a county wide municipality, municipal fiber network. And part of that network was for the express purpose of innovation and economic development. When the county learned of our plans and vice versa, of the JBG network all across national naming, we've submitted an unsolicited proposal to take control of existing assets under the ground that the county was not able to put to its intended use. And so we actually have a third of our overall network already in the ground as it was acquired in this transaction. And from there, we're building the remainder of the two thirds over time as we build our buildings and kind of densify the rest of the neighborhoods. So really exciting. We think that the term public private partnership gets thrown around quite often, but it here national landing with Arlington County and JBG, we feel like we've got something very commercial, and, and tangible that achieves shared goals and that has really kick started our overall platform. And, as mentioned, we're in the throes of implementation on the other parts of the stack. We're designing engineering for our data centers. And that'll unlock the power of, of outdoor 5g. We're making plans for indoor 5g in building investments that Adam alluded to. And we're also running on implementing our Wi Fi program to allow for connectivity from the sofa to the sidewalk, including with operators who will help deliver that service and sort of be the be the port of call for customers. So they have issues. And then last but not least, we already on the spectrum. And we're hopeful to be announcing some innovative partnerships about how we can actually use that spectrum for different types of networks, including potentially Orion networks here national landing, given that those airwaves are, and those pallets are ready to be utilized.

Jim Frazer  

That's, that's great. Um, you know, there's an awful lot of stakeholders in any project like this, and you know, many of them bring different needs. What have been the challenges that you would have been some of the most significant challenges you faced in, in developing this project?

Adam Rashid  

I think it's really to your point. There's always a lot of stakeholders in kind of any large-scale development project, but many of the things that we're doing are kind of new and innovative. And so it's really coalescing around kind of the goal of trying to create something differentiated here and help and having people kind of entities stretch maybe beyond what they've done in the past. I think, you know, one of the things that we do well as a group I think, is kind of consensus built and try to find structures that that that work for, for everybody. And I know that sounds really generic, but if you take kind of like our AT&T transaction, for example, it's the first time they've done a transaction like this, where they've worked with a private developer to utilize our infrastructure, utilize our power, utilize our infrastructure, from our fiber to our power to our actual mounting locations, to deploy kind of their, their 5g network. And this is something that they haven't done before, we, we had to do kind of a lot of kind of education, a lot of kind of senses, building together with our counterparts over there, to recognize that this is, quite frankly, a more seamless way to roll out infrastructure, namely, 5g. But, but we've been really heartened and gotten a lot of kind of accolades, you know, Senator Mark Warner was quoted in our press release, you know, noting that this could be looked at as kind of a blueprint for the way that you know, digital infrastructure and 5g namely, are rolled out, but it's really trying to find structures that allow for everybody to win and do things faster, more seamlessly, more efficiently. I don't know if you've been

Jim Frazer  

so as a as a commercial real estate organization. Um, you know, what systems did you put in place to verify and validate your all of these technology suppliers that, you know, will come to be your, you know, your long-term partners here?

Vardahn Chaudhry  

So, you know, I think for us, Jim, there are a couple of different lenses through which we make those decisions and really approach those discussions, I think, at the highest of levels, you know, given that we are a organizes a REIT, I think our intentions are, are very clear. And we're very open about this, at the end of the day, this digital infrastructure platform, we think is going to have a rising tide effect for the entire neighborhood for the municipalities, and really all the stakeholders. But we also think quite frankly, as Adam said, you know, fundamentally, we think real estate houses the economy. And this digital infrastructure platform presents in a set of brand-new amenities that are really, you know, the first that are kind. And so we believe very strongly that if we're successful in deploying this digital infrastructure platform and attracting the users and effectively tenants of ours, that that will be the innovators in this ecosystem, that'll be good for our core business. And so I think that as a Northstar drives a lot of our partnerships and decision making. Make sure that when we work with foundational partners of ours, that our interests are aligned in in achieving that outcome of establishing the infrastructure in a way that is robust, and as is purpose built for the end tenants and the end innovators. And then beyond that, when it comes to more sort of technical decisions. We really, you know, think very critically about who has the best technology, how do we make sure we're not falling into a situation that will result in vendor lock, supply chains being what they are in? In today's world, we're very critical in thinking through which suppliers and technology providers can, you know, be where we need them to be at the right time. So all those sorts of traditional decision-making processes are in place as we kind of build the stack from the ground up.

Jim Frazer  

Right. Let me ask, you know, are there use cases that I mean, I recognize it's early for this development? But are there use cases that you're starting to hear about that seem to resonate in seem to be sort of the leading candidates to reside on this infrastructure platform? You know, is it you know, medical imaging that requires that bandwidth? Or are there are there other hotspots that you're starting to see?

Adam Rashid  

Yeah, there's a few. I think we're getting a lot of interest now, kind of from AR VR, kind of just broadly XR companies, I think the ability to kind of have kind of the amount of kind of bandwidth and low latency that we're going to be able to offer at scale is something that's really interesting to folks, both from an entertainment perspective when we're talking to different players, and then also from what kind of an enterprise and kind of we can think about the future of Office perspective. So XR is a place where we're starting to see folks really lean into the platform and the infrastructure be a true differentiator. We're also seeing some interests kind of from autonomy broadly, whether that's, you know, robotic delivery. Or we, we recently stood up in partnership with Virginia Tech's Transportation Institute. So their Transportation Institute is kind of a top three, Transportation Institute in the world, we recently stood up a Smart Mobility coalition, where we, we hosted about 90 companies to come in and think about kind of the future of smart mobility and autonomous vehicles, you know, trying to break that down from, you know, a Northstar goal of hopefully making national landing a true CVX environment, but breaking it down into initial projects from smart intersection to, to kind of the data that's required to share across vehicle and infrastructure and the likes. So autonomy broadly. And then, you know, I guess you'd probably consider it another infrastructure layer. But we're, we're starting to see a lot of traction for both for I guess, different parts of compute, mobile edge compute, high-capacity supercomputer to kind of unlock the true power of, of AI, utilizing real time data from kind of the IoT sensors throughout the market. And then also quantum computing.

Jim Frazer  

Yeah, I think, you know, most people tend to grab on to the high bandwidth of 5g and not and not focus as much on the low latency. You know, I come from a transportation background. And this does seem to be a tremendous testbed for, for cellular to connected vehicle C to Vx technology, as well as in the somewhat different scenario of true autonomous vehicles, I could see an awful lot of interest in that area.

Vardahn Chaudhry  

Absolutely. We feel the same way. And that's where we are heartened to really dive into the details of how an implementation might work for a connected vehicle platform with smart intersections and really getting into the call it nuts and bolts of how, you know true autonomy L for autonomy would work potentially, over 5g networks, and having a partner like Virginia Tech, who's a partner of ours on in the neighborhood writ large on real estate, but also in, in bringing their transportation acumen to the table to basically be sort of the driver of some of these projects at a testbed level, bringing the OEMs and technology providers to the table to really solve in a real world live fire environment, how a project might come to life using infrastructure that we're putting in place, including 5g networks. I think you're absolutely right, Jim, the opportunity seems to be ripe for these autonomous solutions to ride on 5g. But I think the only way we're going to actually work through the kinks, so to speak, and then have a scalable, extensible solution is, you know, by being able to try it in a in a live fire environment. And that's sort of how we have envisioned national landing from the start.

Jim Frazer  

No, I think it's it is it is a nice evolution there are there are a number of connected vehicle testbeds out there around the country, rural ones, city ones, highway applications, but none are this large, nor do they have the varied or do they have this this matrix of all of these different scenarios of high speed roads of tall buildings where GPS can't locate your vehicle and all of these complexities there, they tend to be focused on one particular application. And any one of them. What else does JBG SMITH Do other smart city applications where you're rolling out a similar platform?

Adam Rashid  

Right now? We're just focused on national landing. You know, I think, you know, you mentioned it with some of the complexity that, that that is national landing, and we truly do believe, again, that this is a microcosm for nearly any urban environment in the world from multimodal transit to kind of extensive office and residential open spaces, you know, a major airport. And so our goal right now is to is to really get it right. You know, to southern Florida on set. Our goal for this year is to really be online with much of the F restructure, and start to showcase again, what this infrastructure can open up. And then, you know, in the future, you know, think about kind of how this could be extensible to other places. But for now, we're really focusing on trying to try to try to stick to our knitting, get this place, right and, and hopefully truly be a beacon on the hill for what a smart city can be if built from the infrastructure up. Superb.

Jim Frazer  

Do I mean, I know you're focused on getting this right, in the next, you know, 12 months, 24 months, but you must have done some blue sky thinking about what does the future look like? Are there some perspectives you can offer in that domain?

Adam Rashid  

I'll start and, you know, Vardon, and I love to riff on this. Look, I think that eventually, you know, for us to truly unlock the power of industry 4.0, you know, scale developers, municipalities will have to start thinking about infrastructure, digital infrastructure, truly, in a converged way. You know, we think that we're onto something in the way that we're thinking about it. And it has the ability to truly transform kind of, you know, the built environment. And so we think that for time, there's going to be kind of different places that that look similar to what we're trying to build in national landing. But it will take kind of leaders, whether they be private sector leaders, or kind of municipal leaders, to, to, to embrace kind of, you know, we think that this kind of 5g revolution is going to be the sharing economy for kind of enterprise. And so to embrace this kind of new way of, of doing business, where we're looking for different structures that allow for, for all of us to kind of grow on top of the infrastructure. And again, that could look like a similar kind of scale development like this, or that could look like at a city, you know, bringing on a partner to think through what the future of their digital infrastructure looks like. But we truly believe that kind of in order to unlock industry 4.0 You start with the infrastructure, and you let the innovators do what they do best, on top of it. agree with everything Adams said,

Vardahn Chaudhry  

I think you know, when we when we do have some time to Blue Sky about the future, we realize very quickly, the F frankly, even in this process, we're realizing that, like we've said this, this infrastructure platform, we think is the first of its kind. But we're we'd be surprised if it's the last of its kind. And so I think increasingly we'll we're it's likely that other communities will feature this infrastructure. But we're really putting our elbow grease into this and bootstrapping this, this platform in house at the moment. And we're sort of what we found early on is left to its own devices, the market of infrastructure providers, sort of the usual suspects, don't build networks, converged networks across the stack from the wires under the ground to the airwaves and spectrum in a converged way at neighborhood scale. And so, you know, I think the future is bright. And more and more of these converged networks will have to crop up. But we're excited to be cutting our teeth on this project and building it first here national lighting. Yeah, you know,

Jim Frazer  

gentlemen, um, you know, I have a question I probably could have asked earlier. But, you know, we've we focused on the amenity function, you know, as a as a real estate operator, the amenities for your tenants. But how about impacts to the buildings that you in fact, own AND OR manage in terms of sustainability, energy usage, air quality, security systems? What does this platform do for your own internal processes in that regard?

Vardahn Chaudhry  

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the fundamental benefits are going to be the same. And you know, we talked about being in the easy button for innovators. We're already having discussions internally, we have a head of sustainability, Ken Paxton, who, with whom we're very tied in with and what we're working on is how to make sure that our buildings feature the best technology for the specific building, you know, different technologies, as you might imagine, for residential properties versus commercial, and how this infrastructure that we're building can be useful for our own operations and our own sustainability efforts, I think, generally speaking, you, what you'll find is that the network layer in the stack is, in many cases, the lowest common denominator, it's, if it's not there, it ends up being a very expensive cost item. If it is there, it may not be there the exact with the exact right sort of options that are best for any number of installations of whether it's IoT devices, or integration between systems, you mentioned security and access control. So we fundamentally believe that this infrastructure will help us optimize our own operations. And we're currently, you know, in parallel and actually building the infrastructure, working closely with our teams to really nail down what we can do across our mix of uses. You know, one of the key projects we're working on first is security, access control and finding the finding a way to use our infrastructure to our advantage, to enable seamless access to different buildings to specific people who might, you know, access a commercial building and one afternoon and later that afternoon, be able to access specific spaces in a residential property? And believe it or not, that's, that's complicated, and, and very operationally intensive. And so we're we are working on how we can solve that, in many cases using our infrastructure.

Jim Frazer  

Well, Adam and Vardan, this, this has been a great a great discussion. We're just about out of time. Do you have any last comments for our audience today?

Adam Rashid  

I would just say were super excited about the work that we're doing, we really think that we're, we're really fortunate position to have kind of these phenomenal anchors at a phenomenal location and we're trying to do our best to, to lean in to, you know, be a small part of ushering in the future ushering in kind of true scale adoption of industry 4.0. And we are inviting all collaborators, be it at the infrastructure layer level, at the technology level, at the policy level, to really think about national landing as a true microcosm. And to think about national landing is a place where you can build local and scale global.

Jim Frazer  

That's great. So gentlemen, for if we do have collaborators, which I'm sure we will on are listening to this podcast, how do they contact both of you

Vardahn Chaudhry  

be really happy if folks could actually come and visit us and see what we're building your national landing, the easiest way to get in touch with us is to check out the national landing website, and L dot JBG. smith.com. And also, Jim, we're happy to give you our contact info, you know, you can reach us, Adam and myself by email, and we'd be happy to get in touch.

Jim Frazer  

Great, great. So once again, our guests today have been Adam Rashid head of smart cities and digital infrastructure, and Vardahn Chaudhry, Vice President of smart cities and digital infrastructure at JBG Smith. Thank you again, gentlemen, for really a very enlightening discussion today. And we look forward to seeing our listeners on another edition of the smart city podcast very soon. Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks a lot, Jim. Thanks, Jim. All right Talk soon guys.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

infrastructure, building, landing, national, smart cities, smart, platform, technology, fiber, adam, true, city, scale, municipalities, digital, neighborhood, innovators, network, jim, smith

SPEAKERS

Adam Rashid, Jim Frazer, Vardahn Chaudhry