An idea of "Smart Cities" works when an economy is booming. The problem is that the economy isn't booming, contrary to popular belief. Take a look at the real estate market. When you see interest rates are lowered, but you also have a major decline in home sales, this indicates that large purchases are trending down. A slump in the home market show that people are gearing toward rentals or short term leases for homesteads.
Why did I bring this up? The gig economy is what brought this upon this company. Verizon's taking advantage of this by laying off people that have been situated in jobs and put in time for the company. Verizon wants short term people that have the ability to move wherever they want them to go at a moment's notice.
Circling back to Smart Cities, the current economy shows that it wants a bargain basement service that sort of works and allows people to use data. In a lot of places, people are content with free Wi-fi and just dont want to be affected by mobile network congestion. The do not care one bit about being able to control IoT nor do they care about implementing a faster network, but rather a STABLE and consistent network whenever they go to new area.
Those that are left behind in the company will tell you that the quality and handling of customers and the quality of network has deteriorated dramatically regardless of doctored up root metric scores. It's all fugazi.