By Francisco Jariego, Director of Industrial IoT, Telefónica
More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, and that share continues to grow every year.
As urban areas become denser and more complex, cities face mounting challenges: congested transport systems, worsening air quality, increasing energy demands and the impacts of climate change.
Governments and local authorities around the world are responding by transforming their towns and cities into “smart cities”—urban environments connected through sensors, smartphones, computers and a wide range of digital technologies designed to improve sustainability, efficiency and quality of life. In the UK, for example, councils such as Westminster in London are deploying smart parking sensors across their road networks. These sensors provide real-time information about vacant parking bays through an app, helping drivers find spaces faster and reducing both congestion and carbon emissions.
When scaled up, these kinds of solutions can make cities across the globe greener and more efficient.
Telefónica served as programme lead for Smart Santander, one of the largest smart city experiments in the world. The initiative was developed under the European Union’s Future Internet programme, which supports experimental research and development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
Turning Santander into a living laboratory was a significant undertaking. The city is home to around 180,000 residents and, thanks to its beaches, cultural attractions and history, also attracts many visitors. With EU funding and a consortium of 25 partners from Europe and Australia led by Telefónica, Santander became an extensive experimental testbed for urban IoT technologies.
The team installed more than 15,000 sensors across an area of about 35 square kilometres (13.4 square miles). Work began in September 2010 and was completed in October 2013, carried out in four phases. The project later expanded to place sensors on buses across the surrounding region, increasing the coverage to nearly 5,300 square kilometres (2,030 square miles).
Each phase deployed different sensor types depending on the intended services. Many sensors were housed inside small enclosures attached to street infrastructure such as lamp posts, buildings and utility poles; others were embedded in pavements. Some sensors were mobile—installed on buses, taxis and police vehicles—and residents could participate simply by installing an app on their smartphones, effectively becoming moving sensors themselves.
These devices measured a range of variables, from light and pressure to humidity and temperature. Vehicles broadcasted their locations in real time while dedicated units monitored air quality levels. All sensors were connected wirelessly through a backbone network to Telefónica’s M2M platform, enabling frequent data transmission—sometimes as often as every two minutes.
Telefónica’s Smart Business Control platform processed and extracted actionable intelligence from these large data streams, presenting real-time insights to city officials. The solution could be extended with additional capabilities developed through FI-WARE components—another EU-funded initiative—allowing municipalities to address evolving ICT requirements.
Smart Santander has many similarities with city-building simulation games like SimCity. The City Council can view a live snapshot of the entire sensor network and use that view to deliver new services: measuring air quality, remotely dimming street lights where there is no activity, optimizing park irrigation and operating a smart waste collection system that empties bins only when they are full. Municipal staff gain a continuous view of key metrics, enabling faster, better-informed decisions and more efficient resource planning, which in turn delivers cost savings.
For citizens, the city becomes a responsive, interactive environment. Residents can access real-time information to make informed choices that save time, money and effort, and they can engage directly with municipal services like never before.
What comes next? The vision is to make every city smart and to empower individuals to install connected sensors and monitor readings through apps or websites—then create automated rules that trigger actions based on those readings.
Putting smart-city technology into the hands of consumers—for use in homes, gardens and workplaces—extends the benefits beyond municipal infrastructure. When individuals can run their own connected systems, similar to their personal “SimCity,” we can collectively tackle urban challenges and change not only how our cities work but how we live in them.