Bristol issues call for tech partners

The British city of Bristol is looking for technology partners and projects to test technologies on its city-wide network.

Bristol is Open is a private experimental optic fibre broadband, wireless and high performance computing network, which allows for street-level testing of scalable experiments. It has been designed to effect process and policy changes at the municipal level, covering issues such as energy conservation, air quality and pollution, transport, connectivity, and data collection and sharing.

“Bristol is Open has an exciting future,” said Julie Snell, Managing Director, Bristol is Open. “True smart city innovation positively impacts on citizens’ lives, whether we are aware of it or not, and that is at the centre of our purpose.”

She added that Bristol is driving citizen well-being improvements through technical and digital means by partnering with community and urban organisations.

“Our living lab allows for street level projects to be rigorously tested on our private, secure network to manage risk and feasibility before implementation,” she said, adding that the aim is to stimulate and study the convergence in cities of different telecommunication, software, hardware, data and sensing technologies.

Ten projects are already running on the platform and cover smart home and energy, live energy consumption data from smart goods, and air quality and mobility data to help identify the least polluted and safest routes to walk around the city.

The network is available to academics, start-ups, SMEs, mid-sized to large corporates, and government organisations. The network would be open to them in the testing, exploration and development of products and services that could then lead to commercial product improvements and launch.

“Bristol is Open is here to support and develop your business, especially if it requires city data collection, a cyber-secure and completely private fibre optic network for software, and hardware testing,” said Snell. “If you have an interesting tech approach to smart city infrastructure, we want to hear from you.”

The project won the judges’ choice at the Mobile World Congress GLOMO awards ceremony in February, and was cited for its test bed aspect and its city operations centre’s influence on broader urban policy.