Bristol Is Open - NEC partnership aims to develop the open programmable city

NEC Corporation has signed a long-term partnership agreement with Bristol Is Open, a smart city initiative in the UK and a joint venture between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol. It aims to create the world’s first open, programmable city to support the creation of innovative new smart services for people, business and academia. It intends to pave the way for improvements in a wide range of services, including traffic congestion, waste management, entertainment, e-democracy, and energy
February 10, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
1068 NEC Corporation has signed a long-term partnership agreement with Bristol Is Open, a smart city initiative in the UK and a joint venture between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol.

It aims to create the world’s first open, programmable city to support the creation of innovative new smart services for people, business and academia. It intends to pave the way for improvements in a wide range of services, including traffic congestion, waste management, entertainment, e-democracy, and energy supply.

The partnership helps NEC to demonstrate new approaches to pervasive digital connectivity at city-scale, combined with its aim to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow. It helps Bristol Is Open to further its goal of creating the world’s first open programmable city with a city-wide digital fabric that includes fibre in the ground, an experimental wireless mile, and a radio frequency (RF) mesh that covers the vast majority of the city.

NEC, Bristol Is Open and Bristol City Council are part of the €25m Replicate Lighthouse City consortium, alongside San Sebastián and Florence. The consortium will create integrated smart city solutions to tackle urban problems such as traffic congestion, poor air quality and unsustainable energy use. The consortium has received funding as part of the Smart Cities and Communities funding call, through EU’s Horizon 2020 innovation programme.

NEC has been supplying Bristol Is Open with advanced IT and communications technologies, including software-defined networking (SDN) compatible switches, LTE small cells and iPASOLINK ultra-compact microwave systems, helping them to build the smart city test bed platform.

The UK’s Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey said: "Bristol Is Open is one of the UK’s flagship digital smart city projects, led by the University of Bristol and Bristol City Council and part of the Government's super-connected cities programme. It's great to see NEC partner with Bristol Is Open, a collaboration that will help bring even more innovative technology and smarter services to Bristol residents and businesses."

Related Content

  • November 23, 2018
    Venkat Sumantran: ‘Smart cities are more hype than reality’
    For all the talk of smart cities, investment in systems lags significantly behind organic expansion in most places. Andrew Stone talks to Venkat Sumantran, who has been looking at how to create a coherent framework which could help authorities answer multiple mobility questions Two megatrends are posing unprecedented challenges to those trying to keep people moving around the world’s urban areas now - and in the years and decades to come. The first is rapid urbanisation. One in six of us lived in urban a
    Read More
  • January 28, 2016
    Four UK cities awarded funding to drive green car revolution across
    Four cities have been awarded significant funds to promote green vehicle technology after successfully bidding for a share of a multi-million pot created to support the take-up of plug-in electric cars across the UK. Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin announced the winners of the Go Ultra Low City Scheme, after the successful cities proposed a number of initiatives to support greener vehicles as part of a government competition.
    Read More
  • June 5, 2023
    15-minute cities: Path to dystopia or storm in a side street?
    Urban planners and transportation professionals will need to address wild accusations about the motives behind 15-minute cities - and relevant criticisms too - if the concept is to scale to its potential
    Read More
  • March 18, 2019
    UK council ‘budget cuts’ halt development of EV charging
    More than 100 UK local authorities say they have no plans to increase their number of electric vehicle (EV) charging points. These findings have been revealed from freedom of information (FoI) requests submitted by the Liberal Democrats and shared with The Guardian newspaper. According to the report, Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat former energy and climate change secretary, says the lack of investment in charging points is due to “cuts to council budgets”. “Unless there is urgent action to tackle our out
    Read More

Highlighted Content