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T-Mobile & Nokia team up to implement smart city IoT solutions

Over 600,000 people call Las Vegas home; but with 43 million people a year visiting Las Vegas, smart city applications for business travelers and tourists are just as important to city management as they are for the citizens. This dichotomy means their needs won’t match those of other cities with a similar population and it requires an innovative approach to solving their problems.

It’s for this reason that T-Mobile selected Vegas as one of its lead cities for IoT innovation and why they joined Nokia's IoT Community ecosystem. The ecosystem brings companies together to explore and drive IoT solutions for real problems. Such a collaborative approach with a focus on the business problems first, accelerates implementation of solutions that are highly relevant for the customers.

Car sharing to rise

One example is the Connected Rental Car. Nokia recognized an increasing need for innovative car sharing solutions — Frost and Sullivan expects the global car sharing market to grow to ~427,000 vehicles by 2025. At the same time, it becomes a platform for city discovery, navigation and payment, while driving around in the smart city. This week at the IoT Evolution Expo in Las Vegas, T-Mobile and Nokia demonstrated this solution to the Expo attendees.  Instead of showing slides, we brought a real, IoT enabled Mustang so they could touch and feel how, for example, this solution creates a seamless automated experience – from car rental to parking, to automated fuel payment to expense management for business travelers. Smart parking will lower traffic and pollution, while providing a revenue source for the city.

“We’re all about breaking down barriers for IoT customers,” said Doug Chartier, senior vice president at T-Mobile. “Nokia’s connected rental car, powered by T-Mobile SyncUP DRIVE, harnesses the power of our 4G LTE network to create a seamless, next-gen experience for travelers that just works.”

Another useful smart city application example is flood abatement, which will detect rising water levels in the drains of Las Vegas, enabling the city to take proactive measures for safety of its residents. Municipalities can quickly realize the value of IoT once they couple this with additional applications such as smart lighting, smart waste management or video analytics. The common glue for all these applications is Nokia’s award winning IMPACT platform. Having a common platform allows the smart city to, for example, get real time insights on parking utilization while measuring air quality at the same site. Or it could provide correlation of video scene anomalies with storm drain level measurements to avoid flash floods (yes, there was even a flash flood while I was in Vegas!).

Demonstrating the combined strengths amongst an ecosystem of members does not only produce innovative results, but also delivers on the promise of the IoT in improving people’s lives.

Want to join our IoT Community?

Read here to learn more about what Nokia is doing in smart cities. If you are a city looking to enhance the quality of life of your citizens and tourists by leveraging our IoT Community ecosystem, we’d love to hear from you.

If you are an NB-IoT device vendor or application developer, consider joining our IoT Community so you can get plugged into projects like these around the world. And if you weren’t able to see our live demo at the Las Vegas event, watch this video showing the amazing features of our connected rental car:

One of the most talked about features of the demo was the ability to automatically wipe all your settings, including contacts and location history, after dropping off the car. I guess some of what happens in Vegas really should stay in Vegas after all!

Share your thoughts on this topic by replying below – or join the Twitter discussion with @nokianetworks using #smartcities #IoT