Orange is building intelligent infrastructure in towns and countrysides from Gdansk to Galicia
Orange Spain is working with Ericsson to build a rural network in Castro del Rey in Galicia that gets around the fibre shortage by using Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) as alternative to fibre. The collaborators are using a 5G node (gNodeB) co-located with an LTE node (eNodeB) to provide high-speed broadband services to local company Agroamb.
Meanwhile, in Poland resource management company Veolia and Orange claim they are creating a smarter water network.
Veolia and Orange signed a Letter of Intent to roll-out Smart Water and other ‘intelligent city’ services across Poland as part of a national Smart City project.
The pledge to make water supply infrastructure management more efficient was one of many mooted projects announced at the 30th Economic Forum in Karpacz, Poland.
The Veolia/Orange pact propose to fight waste by monitoring water supply networks, balancing consumption and stemming water losses. The quality and security of water supply to customers is another targeted area for improvement with customers being promised a special tool that will help to engender more of an ecologically minded spirit in the consumers.
The tool could also empower the customers to monitor leaks and failures linked to the original internal installation. Orange and Veolia will jointly develop a system for remote reading of individual and supply meters as well as monitoring of fire hydrants.
Monitors smoke and the water
Orange’s Smart City systems are already used in 80 Polish cities and towns, mainly as water meters, smoke detectors or city bike managers. It has already dabbled in Smart Water in 34 Polish cities and towns.
“We integrate services and technology into a single platform so we can manage the full range of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, communication and data. We want to develop our IoT-based services and our collaboration with Veolia is an important step in this direction,” said Julien Ducarroz, CEO at Orange Polska.
Joint activities will include the control of district heating substations, remote reading of heat and electricity meters, monitoring of heating network operations, managing the energy efficiency of buildings and using comms to develop an energy efficiency management platform for industry.
The first pilot project involves replacing 16, 000 water meters in the homes of 73,000 inhabitants in Miasteczko Śląskie, Tarnowskie Góry and the commune of Woźniki.
Veolia manages resources for 123 local governments in Poland and the heating networks for 78 cities and towns and supplies heat and water to almost 3 million customers. “Being smart means real time control, quick response, information without delays and complicated processes which we always optimise,” said Krzysztof Zamasz, Commercial Director, a member of the Board at Veolia in Poland.