Orange reveals 5-step plan for smart cities of the future

Orange, the leading French telecom operator, has just brought forward its vision of the future of smart cities and how the company plans on encouraging and implementing these plans. Painting the street orange involves a five step programme that will harness the availability of data and digital technology to improve sectors ranging from the day-to-day tasks of the city to the longer term bigger picture stuff.

Mobility:

The first of these five points is improving the mobility within the cities. This involves providing and improving on-board entertainment and security services for people’s cars. These include a host of things such as proving traffic updates using its network’s activity. Traffic forecasts can be predicted using data collected from Orange’s mobile phone network.

The programme is also focusing on information and making emergency calls more accessible. Orange is even working on a system that informs car drivers in real-time of the number of parking spaces available and guides them to an open space. Fancy, eh?

Public transport:

Orange is also encouraging the public transport sector though. By improving connectivity, e-ticketing and real-time information the company plans to make public transport more user-friendly. For example, apart from free wi-fi services on buses, passengers can purchase bus tickets via their smartphones while simply validating the tickets using NFC technology.

Smart grids:

Smart grids will be used to help people distribute and manage energy more efficiently. This is done by using data collected from smart meters measuring gas, water and electricity to provide people and companies to optimize the distribution networks for energy supplies.

Daily life for services and tourists:

‘Ma ville dans ma poche’ (my city in my pocket), provides applications that uses and combines data collected from services including canteens, swimming pools, libraries, transport and also tourism, culture, sport, modern conurbations. All of these services would be managed by different IT networks.

Not only will this meet the and greet the lucrative tourist demand, it also focuses on “planning for and managing natural disasters.” This is done by matching the temporal and geographic factors underlying natural disasters.

Developing of smart buildings

Last but not least there’s the support the company will give to creating smart buildings. This involves services that enables helping and encouraging the gradual migration towards the computerisation of buildings for business use. Things included here involves “personalised and simplified visitor reception, multi-site management of energy consumption, dynamic displays of enriched communications for employees and geolocation for routing and flow management applications.”

Most of these implemented smart technologies involves smartphone technology using NFC. Isn’t it great?

Sharing this initiative’s philosophy and aspirations, head of Orange Smart Cities Nathalie Leboucher says the following:

“We believe that networks, the ability to exploit data and to propose dematerialized and mobile services are key to the transformation of cities. That is why we wish to place our expertise as an operator and integrator at the service of local authorities and all cities’ stakeholders. The smart city is a rich, but very fragmented ecosystem and that is why cities need to be able to rely on a single player capable of developing partnerships to provide them with a global solution. It is what we are mindful of with our Smart Cities program.”

Orange operates in over thirty countries worldwide and is moving into Africa more steadily. Hopefully, these technologies will start spilling over to cities other than Paris in the near future.

Image via Bloomberg