ZTE sees opportunities for smart city technology in China through a public-private partnership model
Chinese vendor ZTE said that its smart city solutions have been already implemented in a total of 160 cities across 45 countries.
In China, ZTE said it is the first company in the industry to introduce the public private partnership (PPP) model for smart city development, which solves the problems of recovering huge investments in the construction phase and upgrading in the operation phase. “In this model, the government buys services, investments come from social capital, and the companies are responsible for operation, creating a win-win situation between the government and enterprises,” a company spokesperson said.
In February 2014, ZTEsoft, the software subsidiary of Chinese telecoms equipment manufacturer ZTE, signed an agreement with the Yinchuan government to invest $500 million on smart city initiatives. In December 2014, ZTEsoft also inked a contract with the local government and launched its smart city project in September 2015. Under the terms of the contract, 13 subsystems will be implemented during the course of three years featuring a unified top design, scientific architecture, innovative business model, an operation and maintenance (O&M) platform and rich application functionality.
The subsystems stipulated in the agreement are: smart transportation, smart surveillance, smart community, environmental protection, smart all-in-one card, smart tourism, enterprise cloud, smart government, big data analytics center, one cloud, operation center, GIS & 3D map and elastic network.
In Germany, ZTE and the towns of Rüsselsheim am Main, Kelsterbach and Raunheim have agreed on comprehensive cooperation for smart city development. As part of the town network known as ‘Three Wins’, the three municipalities in the German state of Hessen, aim to provide businesses with the smart infrastructure that is required for the digital working environment of the future and are on their way to becoming a European model region for smart city. With the completion of the planning phase, the construction of concrete smart city solutions will now begin, ZTE said. A total of 15 individual projects were selected which will be implemented in separate municipalities or at a cross-municipal level.
ZTE also said that it is currently developing other key smart city inititives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Hungary and Romania.
ZTE smart city solution is based on a city operation center and includes four categories of basic solutions, 14 categories of industrial solutions, and almost 100 sub-solutions. The 14 categories of industrial solutions include: emergency management, safe city, digital city management, smart government administration, smart tourism, smart campus, smart environmental protection, smart logistics, enterprise connectivity, smart education, smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart community, and citizen card.
ZTEsoft has been working on the execution of smart cities projects for the last six years. The company previously said that most of the work is related to the implementation of smart metering, smart lighting, and smart parking solutions for municipal and regional governments.
The company has been involved in smart city-type projects in Laos, Sri Lanka, France, Romania, Turkey, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Chile, Venezuela and Uruguay, among other countries. The vendor also said that it is seeing increasing business opportunities in smart city projects in certain Asian markets such as India, where the local government is seeking to develop a nationwide smart city program.
