Source: Telefonica's Digital Hub
Valencia City Council has announced that it has awarded the Valencia Smart City tender to Telefónica. It will be the first Spanish city to centralise all of its municipal information through a smart city technological solution and will be based on the European FI-WARE standard.
The base of the software will consist of 350 sensors that will manage the municipal services of the city. Traffic, street lighting, gardens, local police, pollution, cleaning and waste collection and weather services will be constantly monitored and connected to a network.
The capital of the Valencia region becomes the only Spanish city to bring together all of its services through 350 connected sensors, allowing for the management of public resources through a single connectivity platform and enhancing various areas such as transport, energy efficiency and environmental services.
Javier Castro, general manager of Telefónica in the region of Valencia, Murcia and the Balearic Islands, emphasised the company’s commitment to the project, stating: “Telefónica has the firm intention of making the city of Valencia a global benchmark in smart cities.” In Castro’s opinion, “Telefónica has developed the best solution on the market, one capable of guaranteeing resource sustainability, more accurate incident reporting in real-time and more robust solutions to problems.”
Out of all of the proposals presented, the City Council judged Telefónica’s Smart City solution as the most advanced. The platform is designed to monitor everything happening in the city and set out strategies that increase efficiency, thereby improving the quality of life for the inhabitants of Valencia and the thousands of tourists who visit the city every year.
Reducing public spending, optimising management efficiency and improving quality of service are the main objectives of this platform. The regional general manager at Telefónica highlighted some of the practical uses for the platform:
City managers will know what is happening in the city in real-time and can cancel automatic irrigation on rainy days, open traffic lights to let an ambulance through, switch on street lights on a cloudy day to improve visibility and notify citizens where there are free parking spaces, along with many other possibilities.
Telefónica’s IoT (Internet of Things) platform adheres to the specification of the European FI-WARE standard. It consists of the FI-WARE services developed by Telefónica I+D, which are considered essential for defining an advanced smart city platform. The platform is offered as a service from the Telefónica Cloud. In addition, the open innovation ecosystem created around FI-Lab (FI-WARE's online experimentation lab) will simplify use of Open Data generated through the platform, allowing collaboration with entrepreneurs in Valencia and boosting ICT services in the city.
Through the implementation of this platform Valencia will become a technological capital, with efficient infrastructure for the likes of telecommunications, energy, transport, emergency and security services and maintenance programmes. All of these services will be constantly monitored and connected to a network, which will lead to enhanced efficiency and new high-quality services.
