AT&T Allies With Tech Companies To Establish Connecting Communities

AT&T has collaborated with various tech organizations to resolve various issues of American citizens.

AT&T has taken an initiative to modernize cities. The telecommunications service provider has collaborated with seven big enterprises to help establish ‘smart’ connected communities as its Internet of Things initiative’s focus.

The telecom explained it is establishing a framework of smart cities with its collaborators to start with Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Atlanta wants to improve public safety and sustainability, while Dallas wants to improve operations in its West End Historic District, and Chicago is interested in maximizing power efficiency.

With the use of analytics and sensors, the framework of smart cities would be made to let cities remotely monitor conditions of parks, bridges, buildings, roads and other venues for safety and maintenance. It would be including digital signage as far as public transportation is concerned, mobile applications for citizens to help them get ready for traffic conditions, as well as data for public security including gunfire detection.

The Texas based enterprise has said it is also establishing a Smart City Network Operation Center to provide its services as a community conditions’ high-level digital dashboard such as traffic issues, water leakages, and power outages.

AT&T told it is showing many IoT and smart city offerings at its developer conference in Las Vegas this week. Gartner holds the belief that IoT would provide support to total facilities spending of $235bn in 2016, a 22% rise from the last year. McKinsey Global Institute stated the IoT’s potential financial impact would be $4 trillion go $11 trillion per annum by 2025.

In recent times, telecom allied with a number of organizations, including IBM, Qualcomm, General Electric, Cisco and Deloitte Ericsson, all of these would play their role to help it establish connected communities starting in Chicago, Atlanta, and Dallas.

An official of AT&T IoT Solutions, Mike Troiano, said, “We realized it would be extremely difficult and perhaps naïve for one or two companies to do this. We spent a significant amount of time thinking about who are the right tech companies to bring these solutions to bear.”

It has looked for collaborators for the smart initiative in the past 6 months, considering enterprises that have proved to be the best as far as establishing the infrastructure is concerned.

Mike said that initially, the initiative would be focusing on industrial lightning, smart utility meters, and detection of water leakages, but with its additional collaborators, the newly introduced framework now includes public security, transportation, and citizen engagement.

Therefore, this can encompass things such as digital signage and intelligent parking. For instance, AT&T has worked with an organization in California that is known for detection of gunshots.