Deutsche Telekom delivers building blocks for Smart City ecosystem

Deutsche Telekom will showcase its latest solutions for the smart city ecosystem at this year’s Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona under the theme “Smart Services. Liveable Cities.”

A key highlight is the joint presentation of successful live smart city implementations with five European partner cities: Trenčín in Slovakia, Athens in Greece, Kazimierz in Poland, Gijón in Spain and Krk in Croatia. In addition, visitors can experience many more existing smart city services across Europe in live demos.

One such innovative example is the One Smart City wApp (OSCA). Deutsche Telekom is developing OSCA in collaboration with the German Association of Towns and Municipalities (DStGB – Deutscher Städte- und Gemeindebund) and more than 20 Test-Cities across Germany and Spain.

It is a standardized, yet fully customizable solution which city administrations can use to offer their preferred smart services for citizens. The interactive app will allow users to seamlessly access smart city services where ever they are, not just the city they live in. Its aim is to become a simple cross-border solution for smart city services in Europe.

As a pioneer in digitization, Deutsche Telekom drives the digital transformation of cities based on the concept of co-creation: “We help city administrations to more efficiently serve their citizens within and beyond city borders through the joint development and testing of innovative and scalable smart city services,” says Markus Keller, Senior Vice President, responsible for Smart Cities at Deutsche Telekom. “These building blocks together with our work on smart city data processing create a powerful combination for the foundation of a true smart city ecosystem.”

Data Intelligence Hub for Cities

An important platform ingredient for the smart city ecosystem is Deutsche Telekom’s Data Intelligence Hub (DIH). It is the first marketplace for the secure exchange, processing and analysis of data collected by smart city services.

For example, data collected from traffic and environmental sensors, which provides information on the traffic situation in the city center or on air and water quality. Smart city planners will in future be able to combine data from a variety of freely available data sources (open data) and use them in combination to make specific predictions.

Deutsche Telekom has already engaged the city of Bonn as its first DIH partner. Bonn’s city authorities will offer its freely available data sets via the platform. The DIH will become Bonn’s “citizen’s information portal”. It provides Bonn residents access to data about the city. It will provide information such as sight-seeing opportunities, the location of Wi-Fi whotspots and taxi stands as well as waste collection times.

Going Global: United Smart Cities and European Smart Solutions Center

Deutsche Telekom has furthermore established several Smart City programs to accelerate the development of the Smart City ecosystem across Europe. The company has partnered with United Smart Cities, a global initiative established and coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in cooperation with the Organization for International Economic Relations (OiER) and other entities. Both partners will work to jointly develop a global community for cities worldwide.

Deutsche Telekom has also successfully consolidated its smart city expertise and activities in its European Smart Solutions Center (ESC), based in Budapest. The ESC supports Go2Market activities, and also offers a unique competence in consulting cities to utilize funds for urban development, allocated by the European Union.