Milton Keynes is a large town in Buckinghamshire, England located about 45 miles northwest of London, and if all goes according to plan it will be the first city-wide, open access demonstration network for machine to machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) in the country. The city is part of an initiative of a government-backed communications standard to deploy a network that can be used for a variety of applications to improve many citywide services for the public and private sector.
The initiative is part of a consortium of leading technology companies including The Connected Digital Economy Catapult and The Future Cities Catapult UK, Milton Keynes Council and the Open University. The technology is being supplied and managed by British Telecommunications (BT) and Neul Ltd., and they will install a network of Weightless base stations to provide coverage for the connected sensors over an 18-month period.
Once the network is deployed the citywide M2M infrastructure will be able to manage static and mobile sensors. The city is looking to introduce new services for residents as well as encourage outside investors and innovators to use the infrastructure as a testing ground for commercial applications that can be applied throughout the world.
"We see this exciting project as a means of establishing an open innovation environment to support the creation of Machine to Machine and IoT applications across a whole city. This could include anything from intelligent monitoring of parking spaces in the city to networked bins which signal when they need collecting," said Alan Ward, head of Corporate ICT Practice at BT, in a statement.
While Milton Keynes is the first city in the U.K. to deploy it is infrastructure, Silicon Valley will be the first U.S. wireless network for the Internet of things. The infrastructure in the U.S. will be built by SIGFOX, a French company that is looking quickly deploy the network before anyone else.
The company is going to install the infrastructure on existing cell phone towers, and it will use an unlicensed band which is generally used by cordless phones. Once it gets regulatory approval it will be able to connect thermostats, wearable tech, parking meters and anything else that will be part of the IoT.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey