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Fiber-Friendly Tampere Gets Smart With an eye squarely focused on ultra-broadband connectivity, the Finnish metropolis of Tampere's fiber-friendly approach to construction is the foundation of its evolution into a smart city. "All the fiber used by the citizens and the businesses is deployed by the operators in Finland. It's a part of their business. The city only deploys fiber in order to run their own facilities like hospitals, schools, day cares and so on," Smart Tampere Program Director Tero Blomqvist told UBB2020. "However, it is in the city's best interest to have a vast fiber rollout and we have a practice that when we have road works coming up we give the operators… a chance to put in their cables while the road is under construction," he continued. "That way we save everyone valuable time and money as well as avoid unnecessary roadblocks."
Operator and integrator Elisa is part of the Smart Tampere project, working with the city to develop and implement "new fast and flexible infrastructure to boost service development," said Mika Railosalo, vice president of regional sales and SME sales in the Corporate Customers unit at Elisa Corp. , in an interview. "The most important thing is to understand the real needs of the customers and end users, for instance in terms of where to utilize ultra-broadband access," he said. "The Smart Tampere program is a good and natural frame in which to do this study while building new fiber and mobile technology in the Tampere area -- and consequently also launch some new services. We have a good and wide network already in Tampere but at the same time it is useful to develop fixed and mobile networks as we are doing now. More and more fiber is needed as Elisa's customers are using mobile data more and more each year. Elisa's mobile data usage has grown 60% year-over-year, Railosalo added. The arrival of 5G will further increase demand for ultra-broadband, he said. Today's preparations meet current and new requirements, Railosalo said. Other partners in the initiative, which will receive an investment of between 6 million and 10 million euros, include Huawei, Nokia, TreLab, poLight and Doranova Oy. Projects include two robot buses, smart traffic lights and soil remediation.
New services, new Ddemands "For the City of Tampere, the Smart Tampere program is a way to lead a change where the city not only achieves smarter solutions and services, but creates new smarter ways to develop the city that can be utilized in the future, too," said Blomqvist. The city will use multiple measures to determine the project's success, he said. Tampere will review, for example, improvements in public transportation usage, enhanced health services, safety provided by smart lighting and serving the elderly, Blomqvist said. "We are already on the process of recognizing how different digital solutions that are now used by the elderly living at home might be brought together to create more solid data about the person. These kinds of health solutions can, for example, help us release the elderly from the hospitals sooner which leads to happier people but also big savings," he said. " On the mobility side we are looking into automated traffic control which helps the drivers to choose a less jammed routes or a speed that leads them through green lights without stopping." As a telecom, Elisa also expects to experiment with new services in Tampere, said Railosalo. Using agile development processes, Elisa plans to develop and deploy various offerings, and then see which are most popular and widely accepted before promoting them in its other regions, he said. The biggest measure of success to the customer, however, will be the number of new businesses that open the doors or relocate to Tampere, said Blomqvist. "Thriving ecosystems create more business and more jobs, as well as attract new companies and jobs to the region," he said. "New jobs attract a talented workforce that leads to better business. What we aim to achieve is this positive cycle." Other partners in the initiative, which will receive an investment of between 6 million and 10 million euros, include Huawei, Nokia, TreLab, poLight and Doranova Oy. Projects include two robot buses, smart traffic lights and soil remediation. Related posts:
— Alison Diana, Editor, UBB2020. Follow us on Twitter @UBB2020 or @alisoncdiana. |
In a flurry of activity throughout the week, Donald (DJ) LaVoy, Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development at the US Department of Agriculture, and his team spent about $145.8 million in the non-urban or suburban areas of seven states.
Calix reported revenue of $120.19 million – up 4% – in Q4 2019, putting a bounce in the step of company president and CEO Carl Russo and a shine to Calix's ongoing transition from hardware vendor to a provider of platforms enabled by cloud, APIs and subscriber experience.
Looking to curtail e-waste and improve the bottom line, BT will require customers to return routers and set-top boxes, although subscribers will not have to pay a fee when they receive regular broadband equipment.
The industry standards organization is looking to ease operator pain from residential WiFi, while it also sees initiatives in connected home and other projects bear fruit.
Deploying DOCSIS 3.1 across its entire footprint gave Rogers Communications the ability to offer speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s,
contributing to a broadband segement that generated about 60% of the Canadian operator's $3.05 billion (US) in Q4 cable earnings.
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