The major driver behind Bristol’s ascent to smartest UK city (pipping London to first place in Huawei’s 2017 UK Smart Cities Index) is the Bristol Is Open project, a joint venture between the University of Bristol and Bristol City Council, which provides a large scale connectivity testbed and a world class City Operations Centre, integrating innovation programmes into local services and city strategy. “The project”, summarises Tom Macaulay in a recent Computerworld UK article, “is built on an open high-speed network that combines fibre, a wireless ‘hetnet’, experimental network technologies and a radio frequency mesh network deployed on 2,000 lampposts”. Opened just over 13 months ago, Bristol’s Smart City Operations Centre brings together and integrates the council’s Emergency Control Centre, Traffic Control Centre and Community Safety (CCTV) Control Rooms with other citizen service providers. It also provides such services as telecare, alarm and security monitoring and lone worker support with almost 60,000 welfare and telecare calls received each month. The council also operates a City Innovation Team which works on pilots of emerging smart city technologies and the Bristol Data Dome, “a 3D Smart space for visualising real-time data”.
We’re thrilled that Bristol is Open’s CEO, Julie Snell, has agreed to deliver the opening keynote at TRANSPORT Smart Class, South West England & Wales 2018 which we’re hosting at the Radisson Blu Hotel Bristol, Broad Quay, from 8.30am-1.30pm on Wednesday December 5th. Julie’s presentation on “Open Passenger Data and Smart City Mobility” will address a number of ongoing pilots not currently in the public domain. Furthermore, a limited number of delegates will be given a rare opportunity to tour Bristol’s Smart Operations Centre immediately after the networking lunch!
Register here to secure one of the remaining free delegate places (subject to relevant credentials) and if you’d like to be considered for inclusion on the Operations Centre tour (from 1.30pm-2.00pm) please highlight in the “Reasons for attending” box.
