Telefónica said its new offering will allow municipal corporations, urban service providers and entrepreneurs worldwide to integrate in a single scalable, flexible and self-managing solution using M2M sensor technology characteristic of ‘smart cities’.
Based on its M2M solutions, Telefonica said its integrated offering “will deliver added value to town councils and other bodies in the supervision and management of connected devices, their installation and maintenance, and the collection and analysis of data".
According to Telefonica, which owns the mobile network O2, the new offering will create an open ecosystem which will generate new business models and help entrepreneurs to develop and provide their own applications on top of it.
M2M technology combines event processing technology with sensors and tags, allowing companies to apply analytics to every day physical objects.
The Spanish telco unveiled its smart city solution at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, highlighting two initial agreements that will integrate its M2M technology into smart city solutions.
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The first, with US-based smart parking business Streetline, will see Telefónica offer its smart city customers its M2M capabilities, financial services, sales network and customer support, the company said. Streetline will provide the smart parking services, applications and technical support, it said.
The second agreement will see Telefónica partner with Libellum, a developer of wireless sensor networks for smart cities. Telefónica says the partnership will allow integrators to create M2M applications based on real-time information at a low cost.
"With this offering, Telefónica is demonstrating its capacity to respond in an open and flexible manner to the needs of its customers in the increasingly important M2M sector," said Carlos Morales, Telefónica Digital’s global M2M director.
"We are convinced that the solution we are presenting will allow us to deliver an integrated, quality solution which covers the whole value chain in Smart Cities," he said.
Telefónica’s smart city offering currently has 27 different applications, the company said, including traffic management, smart parking and environmental and agricultural monitoring.
