TIM unveils new digital booths for cities of the future

TIM has launched new digital booths with touch screens providing access to a wide range of digital services and content, including public services.

The 'smart' stations created in association with Urban Vision were previewed by Pietro Labriola, CEO of the TIM Group, on the final day of Italian Tech Week. The project forerunner will be the Municipality of Milan, which plans to start making the city's streets and squares smarter and more sustainable as early as 2024.

Featuring a completely new design, the digital booths are an advanced and inclusive device equipped with sensor-activated applications to ensure that also people with motor disabilities, linguistic or visual barriers can get fast, personalised and easy access to information and digital services.

The new booths will provide citizens with a 'digital station' to benefit from infotainment services, smartphone charging, digital payments and ticketing, and free calls to fixed and mobile national numbers.

The digital booths, which are part of TIM's broader 'La parità non può aspettare' (Equality Can’t Wait) project to bridge the gender gap, are an important safeguard in potentially risky situations. The ‘Women+’ button in fact provides real time access to a support service manned by an operator to report, manage and assist the person requesting it. This function has social value providing the community with a tool to combat violence against women or petty crime.

Also significant is the support for culture, tourism and institutional information that the Municipality may want to provide to its citizens in real time, including artistic events in the city, cinemas, theatres, museums, concerts and other events, purchasing tickets, choosing a restaurant, booking a taxi, checking the weather forecast and transport timetables, getting traffic information.

“Innovation is the key to offering more efficient solutions and bringing real benefits to the community - says TIM's CEO Pietro Labriola. With this project we have transformed the traditional phone booth created in the 1950s into a new generation multi-service facility that will help make our cities more sustainable. We have thus seized the opportunity to give part of our heritage, made obsolete by our new habits, a new lease of life, making it evolve and become an important safety device for women in dangerous situations.

Phone booths will therefore be transformed into a tool for citizens to use, confirming our commitment to gender and social inclusion in the smart city era".

“We are truly proud to be TIM's partner in this great project”, says Gianluca De Marchi, CEO of Urban Vision. “In developing the new TIM digital booth, we were guided by the principles that have always defined our relationship with the city: to create value for the community in terms of public use, innovation and safety, through technologically advanced solutions fully integrated with the urban fabric”.

The new booth integrates into the Smart City model promoted by TIM which - thanks to new technologies based on Artificial Intelligence, 5G and IoT - is intended to create more liveable, sustainable and safe urban spaces that also enhance our cultural and artistic heritage. The design of the booths complies with the most advanced sustainability standards (Life cycle thinking) which completely eliminate the carbon footprint through internationally certified carbon offsetting schemes in the local area.

The plan is intended to enhance part of the public telephone communication heritage currently being decommissioned across the country. The launch of the project will involve the city of Milan, where approximately 450 stations will be gradually installed. The initiative will subsequently extend to 13 other main Italian cities for a total of approximately 2,500 digital booths.