Orange has very big plans for Romania, and yesterday he announced the initiation of a pilot project through which he wants to transform Alba Iulia into a smart city. Entitled Alba Iulia Smart City, the Orange project will be completed in 2018 and will represent a collaboration between the operator, the local municipality and the Ministry of Communications and Information Society.
In the press release below you have presented all the details of the project, but in principle we are talking about: wifi hotspots with free internet, intelligent public transport, optimization of pedestrian traffic, solutions for measuring air quality, an application for reporting citizen problems to the town hall and a digital classroom with tablets, digital content and internet access.
Basically, the people from Orange brought together a multitude of organizations and institutions to transform a tourist town into an intelligent one, worthy of the year 2018. Considering that we are talking about a pilot project, everything that is done in Alba Iulia would it could be applied in other cities, depending on the success it will have.
From my point of view, I think that the Orange project is an excellent idea and I hope that it will be extended to all important cities in Romania.
"Orange and Alba Iulia City Hall have approved the collaboration agreement for the Alba Iulia Smart City 2018 Pilot Project
Alba Iulia, November 28. Orange Romania, together with the Alba Iulia City Hall, approved the collaboration agreement for the Alba Iulia Smart City 2018 pilot project, through which city digitization solutions were proposed. Orange Romania's Smart City concept comes as a response to the initiative of the Ministry of Communications and Information Society (MCSI) and had in mind the Digital Agenda for Romania 2020.
The smart city concept proposed by Orange Romania lays the foundations of an open and interoperable platform that can be expanded and adapted to the changing needs of citizens and municipalities. The development and implementation costs of smart city solutions for the pilot project are fully covered by Orange Romania and its partners: Civic Alert, Magnasci (uRadMonitor), Tech Lounge, FullscreenDigital, Gebs (Zoniz), Flashnet.
The created platform benefits from Orange's open infrastructure - 4G networks, broadband based on optical fiber, IoT LoRa WAN, Wi-Fi, bluetooth - as well as the applications and expertise of Orange and its partners, Romanian tech start-ups. The information collected by the sensors installed in the city (air quality monitoring, intelligent lighting management, intelligent water distribution metering, etc.) from the public data sets available at the level of local authorities (www.apulum.ro) and the government (data.dov. ro, ithub.gov.ro) will be aggregated in the platform and will allow the addition of new information from any type of sensor or institution. With the help of an open and queryable application programming interface (API), any organization can develop new applications for the Smart City project.
"Alba Iulia has always been one step ahead in adopting and using revolutionary methods to bring more quality to the lives of its residents. It is not as easy a field as it seems, precisely for this reason we chose to mark the zero kilometer of "smart technology" together with long-term partners. The time has come for Albaiulians to extend their subjective and immediate interest in technology, from the level of the home user environment, to everything that can make our lives easier in the community. With Orange we don't have a limit, only the desire for a limitless horizon, and the year 2018 is the closest target we have set. We will show that the place where Romania was born is the place where modern Romania will be born," said Mircea Hava, the mayor of Alba Iulia.
"We are honored to contribute to the creation of the first Smart City in Romania. In the next six months, we will focus on the installation of the solutions proposed to the Alba Iulia administration, after which the analysis of the results, recalibration and opening of the infrastructure for other applications will follow. Connectivity solutions, innovation, collaboration with local start-ups are important elements of Orange's strategy, which is why the platform we are creating will be interoperable between solutions. Alba Iulia Smart City 2018 represents another step towards the digitization of Romania" said Liudmila Climoc, Chief Executive Officer at Orange Romania.
The Orange Romania concept for the Alba Iulia Smart City 2018 pilot project includes:
- Wi-Fi hotspots with secure Internet access in public areas (in Cetatea Alba Carolina, in bus stations, in the train station, in high schools and universities)
- Intelligent public transport solution in 15 means of public transport managed by Societatea de Transport Public Alba Iulia, which includes secure Wi-Fi access to the Internet for passengers, real-time access to information on the location, speed and direction of travel of the means of transport for the public transport company
- Communication solution with citizens through Wi-Fi hotspots and the E-Alba Iulia application
- Visualization and optimization of pedestrian traffic and public transport, by adapting the Orange Business Retail Analytics solution
- The LoRa WAN infrastructure through which Internet-connected applications and devices will communicate
- Air quality measurement solution, uRadMonitor, which provides information on the level of pollution in the city and the surrounding area
- The solution for tourism promotion and interaction with citizens that includes 250 beacons installed in approximately 225 objectives (museums, universities, fortresses, restaurants, statues, cathedrals) that will transmit information about them directly to visitors' mobile phones
- Public lighting management solution by installing 100 devices provided by Flashnet on lampposts to remotely control the operating schedule and light intensity. The devices send alarms and provide real-time information on electricity consumption for each pole
- Management solution and smart metering of the public water distribution system through 50 devices that also send leakage alerts
- Securing Internet access for all smart city components and monitoring the system through the Business Internet Security platform
- Section dedicated to the Alba Iulia Smart City Pilot Project within the Innovation Labs 2017 startup acceleration program, where the infrastructure will be open to developers
- The Civic Alert solution, through which citizens report city problems to the City Hall, the status of open tickets can be tracked in real time on the City Hall website
- The digital classroom solution containing tablets, digital didactic content, digital catalog, Internet access via secure Wi-Fi and filtered web traffic.
The inclusion of Alba Iulia Town Hall in projects with European funding (Horizon 2020) won by Orange Romania on the use of 5g architecture and technology in smart city applications. Such projects will help co-finance the Smart City Pilot Project in Alba Iulia."
