Telenor and Cisco are to establish a “joint lab environment” to develop smart cities solutions for civic authorities and services providers in Telenor’s home market, Norway.
Cisco said the project will build upon Telenor’s existing connectivity infrastructure, including its Wi-Fi, WAN and mobile networks in cities in Norway, as the backbone for new smart city services.
Telenor will use Cisco’s data platform, Cisco Kinetic, to extract, compute, and move data from connected things to various city-focused applications and services. As yet, the pair have not revealed the identity of the cities that will deploy the new services.
Peter Karlstromer, senior vice president for Cisco’s global service provider business, said: “Cisco and Telenor are building a highly secure, IP-centric network foundation that will grow with them as they expand their business to explore new IoT services and smart city applications.”
Cisco said the new work will establish a roadmap for new services and revenue streams, and enable Telenor to raise performance and customer experience.
Ruza Sabanovic, chief technology officer at Telenor Group, said: “Digitization of societies requires new ways of working and new partnerships. We’re excited about taking our collaboration with Cisco to the next level, setting up a joint lab environment to explore smart city solutions with one of Norway’s largest municipalities – exploring different approaches to connect our customers to what matters most in all stages of their daily lives.”
Meanwhile, French operator SFR, part of the Altice Group, is deploying Cisco’s network automation software, in the shape of its Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), to enhance the agility and reliability of its network.
Cisco said the move will simplify the lifecycle management of its services, automating core functions across physical and virtualized networks for both existing and new customers.
Other benefits include assured quality of service for critical applications, faster delivery of revenue-generating services, and drastically reduced service activation, which Cisco said will go from months to minutes.
Christophe Delaye, CTIO at SFR, said the move will allow SFR introduce a common API for its services across different networks. “As a result, enabling SFR to get back to what matters the most – supporting our customers’ network automation requirements and enabling them to deploy new services quickly,” he said.
