11 July 2013
Orange has created a five-point plan to help local authorities across France solve pressing challenges facing their cities, such as making traffic more fluid, optimising power supplies, and improving the quality of life of their citizens.
According to an article on iptv-news.com the plan covers improving mobility within cities, encouraging the use of public transport, implementing smart grids, developing services to improve daily life for residents and visitors, and supporting the development of smart buildings.
Read the full article here
According to Orange’s own website, their Five Point Plan looks like this:
Improving mobility within cities and making traffic more fluid with connected cars Orange is working alongside players in the automobile industry to develop on-board entertainment and security services (emergency calls) and to provide real-time information about traffic jams and carpooling services. Orange is also helping to make travel more efficient by providing drivers with interactive services designed to. reduce journey times and encourage car sharing in urban areas.
With this in mind, Orange has entered into a partnership with Streetline to deploy a new smart parking solution in France. The system informs car drivers in real time of the number of parking spaces available and guides them to an open space. Furthermore, through the statistical – and anonymous – analysis of the data generated by activity in its mobile phone network, Orange is now able to provide cities and local authorities with a new source of information about road traffic. They are thus able to prepare accurate forecasts of traffic conditions and communicate them to road users.
Encouraging use of public transport. Making communication and information services available to travelers is a key driver for making public transport more user friendly. That is why Orange has chosen to develop services for travelers based on connectivity, e-ticketing and real-time information. For the first time in France, users of a new fleet of coaches, launched by the Departmental Council for Loire Atlantique and operated by Keolis, will benefit from a high-performance, on-board Wi-Fi service, part of the Orange 4G network, from Sept. 1 2013.
The Strasbourg Transport Company (CTS) has chosen to use Orange’s e-ticketing solution. Residents can now subscribe to the service and buy and validate tickets using their Near Field Communication (NFC) smartphone.
Smart Grids: helping distributors to manage energy more efficiently. Smart Grids help to optimize the distribution networks for energy supplies by using sensors on the network and smart meters for water, gas and electricity consumption or by identifying and resolving malfunctions remotely. In 2011, Orange teamed up with Véolia to create the “m2o city” joint venture, which currently operates close to 700,000 water meters in France.
Developing services to improve daily life for citizens and tourists. Including canteens, swimming pools, libraries, transport and also tourism, culture, sport, modern conurbations provide a broad range of urban services to their citizens that are managed by different IT systems. With ‘Ma ville dans ma poche’ (my city in my pocket), Orange offers a new generation of applications that help to combine all kinds of information about the city and supply it to residents. Bordeaux has chosen Orange to develop the future mobile application ‘Bordeaux in my pocket, which will be accessible using NFC mobile phones at the end of the first quarter 2014.
Bouches du Rhône Tourism has chosen Orange to help it manage its tourism strategy. Orange undertakes the anonymous statistical analysis of hundreds of thousands of pieces of data collected via its mobile phone network to produce high added value touristic indicators. These indicators enable Bouches du Rhône Tourism to analyse tourist fluxes, their evolution and visitor behaviour.
Planning for and managing natural disasters is one of the major responsibilities of local authorities. To meet this need, Orange and Thales Alenia Space have developed a natural disaster risk management portal called CEMER. By matching the temporal and geographic factors underlying natural disasters, it is possible to improve the decisions made by Departmental Councils and the coordination of action plans by Prefectures. The Departmental Council of Alpes Maritimes has chosen to make the system operational as of this summer.
Smart Building: supporting the development of smart buildings at the service of the city of tomorrow. Encouraged by new cities, the traditional players in the field of technical building management are gradually migrating towards the computerisation of buildings for business use – the ‘smart building’. Orange offers services such as a personalised and simplified visitor reception, made possible by mobile phones, unique access control thanks to NFC, real time, multi-site management of energy consumption, dynamic displays of enriched communications for employees and geolocation for routing and flow management applications.
Orange supports real estate developers in their smart cities, district and building in the Gulf States and the Middle East.
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Their are obvious parallels between this initiative and IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative, but the strong focus on Mobility and Transport is great news for ITS and a sure sign that ITS systems will be be woven into the fabric of future cities.
Ian
