Smart cities, smart buildings

We kick off with a look at one ICT company’s work to bring the benefits of IoT to councils. Wales-based Pinacl Solutions started its work in the IoT and smart city place around two and a half years ago with Newport City Council. Back then, Pinacl operated a fibre network in the city, along with public Wi-Fi for all the council’s public-facing venues and buildings, and a small concession city centre Wi-Fi network (both the latter use technology from Ruckus Networks).

Pinacl then added an open access LoRaWAN network, which it owns and operates. According to Mark Lowe, Pinacl’s business development director, this came about because the council was “looking to see if IoT could help them drive some efficiencies across various departments and they had the potential to deploy a few pilot use-cases if [an IoT] network existed”. He adds that Pinacl’s decision to build and operate the network made the process much faster than if the council had tried to procure for its own use.