 We're glad to know you're still there and watching the breakfast on PLOS TV Africa. And we did promise you that we'll be looking at technology in architecture, the growth of smart homes, that's what we'll be looking at. And we're glad to have a tech expert here, a digital product manager and a person of Oladipu biology. Good morning and welcome to the program. Good morning. It's nice to have you again on the show. Happy to be back. First of all, we had a guest before you and we had a glitch. Will we ever get to that time where we don't have these glitches when we're talking on Zoom or on any other connecting devices? Are we going to arrive at that point or there's something we need to do now? Yeah, so we're going to get there. At least if you remember, we started with dialogue, right? I don't know if you remember that when you have modern telephone before you can connect to your internet. At some point, we get to a cyber cafe situation where you have to stay overnight before you can download anything reasonable. And at some point, we now start having mobile phones and now we are entering 5G. So we're getting better, bandwidth penetration is getting better. However, we also now have more applications and more usage. So like we discussed the other time on the show, we need to invest more. So it's a good problem to have. A good problem to have? Yes. So it means that investors can actually come into the space, improve their experience and they're going to make money. So when you have that demand, so all you need to do is to up your supply, which is in terms of infrastructure. Of course, there are also challenges. You see road constructions everywhere. Once those construction happens, they cut fiber and some of those utility cables and go and that now pose a challenge to communication. So I keep wondering why can't we plan those things better? And thank God we are talking about architecture today. Why do you have to construct the road? Then later start breaking because, so now we know that once we have road construction, we need to have electricity. We need to have telecommunication lines. So we should be able to design that grand up, have those pipes, seal it up and when providers are coming, you just lease it and people just run their pipe rather than breaking and breaking, opening up, opening up again and again. So those things I think in my opinion cause some of these service disruptions that we experience. Of course also the rural area too. So you know it's also about economics, right? So that's why we still need government intervention to support especially cities that are not commercially viable like Lagos and Vujanco. So the providers will not have incentive to deploy the best of infrastructure to that because you know it's just economics. So that's why when you travel to the interland you just notice some drop in your network performance because of the number of subscribers or customers from that area. So those are the areas where you can have government intervene and when those areas become more viable the private sector will not move in and increase service care. Is there what is the aggression that we have? Because today we're actually talking about architecture like you mentioned and technology. So let's just get an insight into the role that technology can now play in architecture especially in our locality where we know as Nigeria because in advanced countries these things are not... they're not discussing them that we're discussing now but what role can technology play in architectural designs and all that now in Nigeria? Yeah, so technology is pervasive, is everywhere and the good thing is also that the architect, the construction industry, the building industry, the embracing technology right from the tools that they use. So they are no longer using those... what do we call them in school? The board and the ruler and so on. Now you have softwares that could give you very beautiful designs and you know, model, 3D and all that and almost immediately you can... with the clients you can do iterations, check it or I want my guest home to be this way then different designs can come up faster than before so that's one. But coming to the home itself you now have technology empowering architects and builders to be able to deliver what you call smart homes, smart buildings eco-friendly homes. So those are the things that technology has enabled and when we're talking about smart homes what are we talking about? We're just talking about homes where you have so there's what you call sensor, controller and actuators so when you're able to put these things into any device it makes them smarter it means that you can communicate with them and they can also send information back to you so if you have a coffee machine for example and that coffee machine is smart that coffee machine can make coffee for you and it can report when it's running out of supplies maybe coffee beans, water or something like that so now we're having to build buildings that also can respond to whether when the house needs more eats because the building is smart it's able to adjust the temperature and control the thermostat, the eating devices in the house to provide that comfort for you and when it's cold it's able to do that. Interesting this information you've given us but that makes me wonder how much of tech have we involved in the building of our homes especially in Lagos where we've experienced a lot of building collapses matter of fact it's been said that Lagos has the second highest rate of building collapses in Africa so how much of tech would you say we have involved or are involving in our buildings today? So it's a two-way question right? So tech in itself like we discussed at this platform you need a political will to make tech succeed so tech is just garbage in, garbage out so if you can have the best of designs but at the point of implementation if people begin to cut corners if approvers are not proper approvers are not given then it's a different problem of course tech will enable you to do your soil tests faster to do your design faster to do your inspection faster now with tech for example government officials could sit in their office and monitor construction actually you don't need to actually get people on the field to know what is happening with map and geo sensors everywhere if something is happening in the streets and co you can pick it up, you can zoom down and see and even view live as workers are moving on the construction site you can see how the construction is progressing so that tech can allow you to do and that tech is enabling people to do but the human element but has it been deployed in Lagos do you think? so we have many offices that are smart office my office for example it's smart office I know a couple of office and I know a couple of homes that are smart homes eco friendly homes like that and of course it's expensive oh just going to ask you so that's why you may not be seeing many of it around but it's something that people are beginning to you know develop, adopt and also we also have smart homes in what I would call a little way so people are also beginning to have at least smart devices in their homes that can control lighting, that can detect human presence that can be used for security and all that like a couple of weeks ago we were working on a project so this is actually one of those things that are power smart homes so this is a controller this is a sensor so this sensor is for weather humidity and gas so if I program this it could help me to know if there is a gas leakage and it could alert me can it also alert you if your gas is about to finish so that's that would need to, so this one is only sensing the environment leakage but that's an interesting thing why does gas always finish on Sunday we need to discuss that but of course when you have a smart cylinder that would be able to do that do we have smart cylinders now? we can it's a matter of putting, embedding this controller and a sensor inside it but I'm sure if we check around we should have smart cylinders but you were talking about the fact that there are smart offices, you mentioned yours as well as a smart office how many of these smart offices are owned by the government because I was asking about whether it has been deployed by the government, if it is private of course private would be a little bit more expensive to consult and all that does the government in trying to watch these buildings that are being constructed for instance, do they have a smart office that can do the work that you're describing let me add another one or if they don't how much is their level of consultation with the people that own the smart offices like yours? so what I know is that most people in government especially senior ones many of their homes are smart homes so it's not a new knowledge to them so the challenge is why is government not deploying technology at the rate at which private sector or private company does? I think it still come back to infrastructure power how many hours of power supply do government facilities have bandwidth most importantly procurement so procurement in government is usually an issue and lastly sustainability when a DG or a government initiates a smart project, how are we going to continue it so the next person may just terminate that contract they may like how it's overpriced so there's always this bottleneck around so not because they don't know, they don't have it or they don't use it in their private but I don't know so I always tell you that once it's something around government I will support you running away but just a yes or no, that means Legos is ripe enough to start deploying in fact they are deploying the technology and we can start having smart homes and the technology around architecture can be better if there is a will, like a political will and it's always restricted to Legos isn't it? are there other parts of the country that are already we're going to see, yes sure will 5G help us in that? sure, it's one of those use cases of 5G good, I would like to thank you, I wish we had more time I think we will have a part 2 of this if it is going to be possible, we'll talk to the producer so that you can come tell us more about what we need to do because right now this smart device here it doesn't look very expensive, it's like something I can respond and play with it I'm going to have a smart home very soon so we'd like to thank you Oladik Pupo Boloji for coming on the program and it's always a pleasure to have you around thank you so much so Oladik Pupo Boloji is a digital product manager and he's been talking with us on smart homes and the deployment of technology in architecture and we covered so many other grounds that we didn't even anticipate but like I said, if there's a possibility we'll have a part 2 of this but for now, let's take a break, we'll be joined by Wali Agwedde who will be taking over the world's sports, stay with us