BROWSING: Smart Cities

Whatever Vodafone’s intention when polling 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, and whatever its conclusion from their responses, one thing is also clear: business is hard in this economic climate. What also seems apparent, reading between the lines of Vodafone’s enterprise...

In order, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Beijing, London, and Seoul ranked as the top five smart cities, or ‘digital cities’, in a new study by Economist Impact. New York, Sydney, Singapore, Washington DC, and Paris rounded out the top 10, meaning Europe and Asia Pacific contributed...

Critical Communications World (CCW) in Vienna this week (June 20-23) told the now-familiar story of how an influential industrial sector, which has existed in a horizontal tech vacuum until now, is coming to terms with its future as an extreme vertical in a broader...

To get the juices going, on all sides of the IoT divide, ahead of its jamboree LoRaWAN World Expo event in Paris in two weeks, the LoRa Alliance has issued a statement to declare LoRaWAN better – and bigger, and more ‘massive’ – than...

As part of its smart city vision, Las Vegas has invested in a private LTE network and range of IoT initiatives With its iconic, glittering and air-conditioned high-rises, Las Vegas rises out of a hostile, arid desert climate, standing as a testament to what can...

Germany-based IoT provider 1NCE has said it has doubled its NB-IoT footprint with expansion into Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United States. The company claimed it has the “world’s largest NB-IoT coverage map, available at a single...

Right, let’s see how good my notes are two days later; shortly following a shot-across-the-bows from a top analyst at a London private 5G event (Omdia’s Pablo Tomasi at Private Networks in a 5G World), Sweden-based Telia and Germany-based Deutsche Telekom, on behalf of...

Google Cloud has followed hyperscale mega-rivals Microsoft and AWS into the private 5G market with a bunch of specialist vendor and channel partners, starting with Betacom, Boingo Wireless, Celona, Crown Castle, and Kajeet. It said it is offering “turn-key” private 5G with the option...

More operator-bashing this morning at a two-day Informa event in London (Private Networks in a 5G World, June 14 and 15); the opportunity to take cellular into enterprise premises is “fading away” from them, remarked Pablo Tomasi, principal analyst at Omdia, kicking-off the conference...

This is a rehash (and extension, in the end) of a previous post, to an extent; but it distils the message from before, and says there are sure signs, at last, that the private cellular market, covering localised installations of enterprise-geared 5G, nominally, has...

Finland-based Edzcom and Netherlands-based Signify have entered a partnership to build a private smart-city 5G and IoT network using street-lighting and other road infrastructure for the city of Tampere, in Finland. The network, which is to be deployed and densified in quick-time by Edzcom...

Global cellular IoT provider 1NCE has confirmed a long-trailed deal with Softbank, a major investor already in the firm, to release equity to the Japan-based carrier in return for exclusive distribution rights in Asia Pacific. Softbank will sell 1NCE in 19 markets in the...

It is a partnership of industrial-minded telco country-mates that effectively helped to build the early private LTE and 5G market, with joint references in a number of key installations in Europe over the last five years, notably in the ports and mining sectors; now...

Consolidation in the satellite IoT space, already, and again; Swiss satellite IoT operator Astrocast has agreed a deal to acquire busy Dutch industrial IoT scale-up Hiber. Astrocast, with a network of 12 nanosatellites as it stands, has a stated plan to have 20 in...

Time to set the record straight on cellular 5G and Wi-Fi 6/7, a panel of Industry 4.0 luminaries suggested at Private Networks Forum (PNF) a couple of weeks back; these technologies are not, and never will be, mutually exclusive, it implied. They will not...

Private cellular network specialist Athonet has opened a 5G lab in the heart of London’s financial district dedicated to the financial-tech (fintech) scene. The initiative signals the Italy-based firm’s decision to move in earnest into the finance sector, by offering private 5G as a...

The first shot of blue sky in the murky Sigfox firmament? Maybe, just – even despite mutterings of discontent from the old guard and warnings of difficulty for the new regime. A press announcement, proclaiming the “first one-millionth” Sigfox tracker for European postal services,...

Nokia is to integrate Microsoft’s Azure Arc cloud management platform into its MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) solution for mission-critical Industry 4.0 environments. The tie-up will afford customers buying private wireless and edge computing from Nokia a way to also manage Azure workloads, in any...

UK telecoms group BT has revealed a ‘charter’ to invest almost £100 million over the next three years in its new Division X digital change unit, which is at the heart of its broader strategy to establish itself as a ‘tech-co’ (“not a telco”),...

Weird, and frustrating; Swedish vendor Ericsson has issued a press release, the day after Nordic rival Nokia, about a new working relationship with T-Mobile in the US on private 5G. It is the same press release, just with a different vendor attached, just as...

Austrian group A1 Telekom has acquired Bulgarian system integrator STEMO for an undisclosed fee, in order to bolster its proposition for corporate clients, notably international corporate clients, in Bulgaria and beyond. The deal will feed back into A1 group businesses across central and eastern...

German telecoms provider and system integrator Iconec (stylised iconec) is working with private LTE and 5G specialist Athonet to bring the Italian firm’s core network platform to the German enterprise market. Iconec has deployed an Athonet-made core network at its new lab in Nuremberg,...

What to say about the state of the private 5G market – about the state of ‘things’, if you like, at the top-end of the IoT game? I was asked to speak for five minutes to introduce the latest Private Networks Forum (PNF), put...

T-Mobile US has recruited Nokia to help it with private 5G and hybrid public-private 5G networks. The pair will develop products for T-Mobile’s new suite of network solutions for enterprise and government customers, which will afford a higher degree of network ownership and control,...