Smart city company Gowex and Cisco are building a smart city for the Dubai Airport Freezone Authority, as the first stage of a new partnership looking to bring M2M to urban areas.
The smart city solution will use Cisco’s Internet of Everything (IoE) ecosystem, with Gowex providing the business models.
Among the potential deployments are the likes of smart transport and parking, geo-located advertising, urban safety, traffic management and smart tourism.
Gowex is aiming to bring smart Wi-Fi connectivity to 600 cities by 2018. It said the deal with Cisco would strengthen its forthcoming projects. The company is currently operating smart wi-fi systems in more than 90 cities globally.
Gowex CEO Jenaro García said his goal is to bring free and smart Wi-Fi connection to 600 cities by 2018.
He added: “We will position ourselves together as a global Internet reference for cities wishing to offer free Wi-Fi connection and smart services to its citizens and visitors.”
Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s EVP of industry solutions and Chief Globalisation Officer, said: ”More than 50 percent of people live in urban areas today, and Smart Cities worldwide are competing for sustainable, economic and social urban services now as their populations rise rapidly.
“Cisco’s strategic relationship with GOWEX creates a powerful framework for an end-to-end, Internet of Everything solution for urban services. The combination of proven network infrastructure and critical applications not only can optimize all types of urban services but also provide citizens with a better, more connected quality of life.”
The Dubai project is the latest smart cities project to be announced in recent weeks. Last month, Telefónica said it would deploy Fi-Ware as part of its project in Valencia, Spain.
Also in May, BT and Neul announced an Internet of Things project in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. Arqiva and Sigfox are also building Internet of Things networks in cities across the UK.
Meanwhile, Cisco has bolstered its network virtualisation business by buying Swedish based Tail-f Systems.
The company’s products help service providers and enterprise IT companies provide applications and network services in the cloud.
Hilton Romanski, SVP of Cisco Corporate Development, said: “With a rapidly increasing number of people, devices, and sensors connecting across the IoE, service providers require new capabilities to deliver value-added, cloud-based services and applications.
“Our goal is to help to eliminate the bottleneck caused by operational complexity within the network. The acquisition of Tail-f’s network services configuration and orchestration technology will extend Cisco’s innovation in network function virtualization, helping service providers reduce operating costs and the time it takes to deploy new services, making agile service provisioning a reality.”