Deutsche Telekom announced it has established a European Smart Solutions Center (ESC), based in Budapest, Hungary, to accelerate the development of smart cities in Europe.
The ESC is designed to consolidate the smart city expertise and activities across Deutsche Telekom Group, support Go2Market activities, and to make its trusted smart city solutions available to municipalities in Europe, the company said.
One of the focus areas of ESC is the development and implementation of smart city solutions based on NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT), as the NB-IoT technology is ideally suited for many applications in this sector.
“Deutsche Telekom’s aim is to be a leading smart city solutions provider in Europe and a trustworthy, reliable and long-term partner for any city’s move to digitization,” says Ralf Nejedl, Senior Vice President B2B at Deutsche Telekom Europe.
“With the power of IT and Internet of Things we continue to deliver innovative solutions which help make cities future-proof, improve the quality of life for their citizens and enhance economic development,” Nejedl added.
In line with the European Commission’s Digital Single Market policies to promote free access to wireless connectivity in public places, Deutsche Telekom, together with Cisco, has developed a package for cities to implement a tailor-made, secure and user-friendly WiFi4EU solution quickly.
The WiFi4EU scheme will be disbursed in a geographically balanced manner, so that high-speed connections can benefit both residents and visitors of thousands of local communities across the EU – at least 6,000 to 8,000 local communities by 2020. The first call for projects is expected to be launched towards the end of 2017 or early 2018, the company said.
Deutsche Telekom is also offering the Mayor’s Dashboard, a web-based dashboard that enables city administrators to monitor, control and optimize their city infrastructure and applications conveniently from any device, be that their smartphone, tablet or the big screen.
