US telecommunications giant AT&T is using this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, (February 26 – March 1) to unveil its Smart Cities projects, including a collaboration with Cisco.
AT&T and Cisco are currently exploring opportunities to integrate the Cisco’s Kinetic for Cities platform into select AT&T systems, including the company’s Smart Cities Operations Center (SCOC), which provides a near real-time view of ongoing activity in a city.
SCOC securely collects and analyzes the enormous amount of data generated from multiple civic departments and points around the city into a centralized, customizable dashboard. This type of visibility can lead city leaders to make faster, more informed decisions, strategically deploy resources, cut down crisis response times, and save costs.
Cisco’s Kinetic for Cities cloud-based platform helps cities extract, compute, and move data from connected things to secure IoT applications to deliver better outcomes and services. The open architecture of the platform makes it easy to add solutions to address a wide range of city needs.
The platform unlocks citywide data, enabling it to be used by previously siloed devices, applications and services. Data that was once used by a single party to power a single application can now be used by many parties across many applications, multiplying the value of that data, and enabling new services that can help increase the quality of life in cities.
AT&T has also announced that as part of its ‘spotlight cities’ initiative, the city of Portland, Oregon, will soon be piloting two of its Smart Cities systems: Digital Infrastructure and Structure Monitoring. The company will use Digital Infrastructure with Current, powered by GE’s CityIQ, to transform some existing lighting infrastructure into a sensor-enabled data network to will help Portland address issues such as traffic flow and parking. Working with IBM IoT Cloud, IBM Services and Moniteye, the city will deploy devices on various infrastructure in Portland with LTE-enabled sensors to remotely monitor structural behavior, and pass the data to AT&T’s Structure Monitoring platform.
AT&T has also announced IoT communications technology companies Synchronoss and Ubicquia as the newest members of the AT&T Smart Cities Strategic Alliance, which comprises leading industry organizations and tech companies, including Cisco, IBM and Intel.
“When a city’s data is harnessed, analyzed, and acted upon, securely in near real time, it opens up a world of opportunities,” said Mike Zeto, general manager for AT&T Smart Cities. “With our strategic alliance members, we’re delivering solutions that will give city leaders meaningful insights into the communities they serve.”
