Telefonica is beefing up its Smart City offerings, announcing at the recent Smart City Expo World Congress that it is committed to helping cities around the world transform to Connected Cities that are able to deliver a sustainable and secure environment for citizens to live and work. According to Telefonica, it is pursuing extensive collaboration with public institutions in various countries in the region and globally including town councils and regional governments to continue its successful Smart Cities initiatives in Spain and also in Brazil and Chile. Telefonica expects that by 2020, 60 to 70% of the global population to live in big cities.
While extending its Smart City expertise and offerings to other regions, on the home front, Telefonica has already started the ball rolling on positiong Spain as the European capital of Smart Cities. Various initiatives are underway across many cities in Spain with the company providing Smart City solutions for various sectoral applications and use cases. In Seville, for example, Telefonica is pursuing the digitalization of a cargo port where together with the University of Seville and its ecosystem partners such as Thales, Portel and Isotrol, Telefonica is deploying innovative tools to improve logistical efficiency via enhanced connectivity and systematized communication between cargo, transport vehicles and port infrastructure. Toward this end, Telefonica said that it will provide connectivity based on WiMax, satellite, fibre optic and 4G the will collect information from edge nodes installed in containers, vessels, trains and automated traffic management systems alongside a horizontal platform based on European Union's Future Internet architecture (FI-WARE) standards.
Valencia is another city that is set to benefit from Telefonica's offering in this area which sees it rolling out the first smart city platform in Spain that is designed based on specifications and standards laid out by FI-WARE. At the same time, the city of Logrono will leverage Telefonica's Plataforma Smart to centralize traffic, street lighting and the 010 citizen information helpline public services.
At the same time, another two cities, Zaragoza and Barcelona are also forging ahead as the next smart cities, with the former working with Telefonica and the local transport consortium on 'Smart Steps' platform that collects, analyses and provides insights into the most efficient way to manage in-city transportation while for the latter, being a popular tourist destination, working with the company to collect information for insights on wider tourism trends and visitor experience. The other city in Spain that has benefited from Telefonica's offering is Santander, having developed services such as smart parking, environmental monitoring, smart irrigation, augmented reality, smart metering, and traffic intensity monitoring using enhanced infrastructure and smart city platforms.
Luis Miguel Gilperez, President of Telefonica Espana
In Telefónica, we believe that people, businesses, cities and society can be more and do more thanks to technology. We all know how technology has changed, and will continue to change, our way of living and working. The digital revolution has not only transfomed the way in which we communicate, but is also changing and will further transform the relationship of cities with their inhabitants. We want to contribute to this change too, and for this reason, we are working with the local councils of Malaga, Seville, Logroño, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia and Santander, among others, to lead this new industrial revolution in cities.
