The Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2019 was held from the 21st to the 23rd May, this time at FIL – Lisbon International Fair, in Parque das Nações, to discuss smart cities, as well as presenting smart solutions and projects, where it seeks to integrate all aspects of the cities of the future, innovation and technology.
In 2014 the idea of creating an event that covered smart cities themes emerged. The pilot project started as “Green Business Week” until it evolved to “Portugal Smart Cities Summit”. Last year, Portugal Smart Cities received around 2.000 visitors and this year 7.000 people were expected. In 2019 the event had around 150 exhibitors, of which 50 startups, and around 20 municipalities. There were more than 10 conferences with more than 100 speakers.
Over the last few months the Smart Cities Tour 2019 has been held, an organization of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities. This tour was in several cities such as Faro, where economy and innovation were topics in discussion; mobility in Aveiro; of the city as a platform in Lisbon; of circular cities in Vila Real; of the inclusive city of Setúbal; of climate change in Ponta Delgada; and in Funchal, the Happy Cities, Happy Island theme.
The culmination of this series of events, where Altice Labs was present in most of them, had once again, the participation of Altice Labs at the Municipality of Viseu booth as an integral part of the “Vissaium XXI” Center for Technology Incubation.
Several innovative projects have been showcased, namely the P2020 CityAction project in which a City Governance Center (CGC) is being developed for a more efficient management of urban space. The City Gateway was also presented which offers heterogeneous radio interfaces, namely LoRa, NB-IoT and WiFi, supporting the communications of the most diverse IoT devices.
For Gonçalo Machado, from the Technology and Innovation Strategy department, who was at the Altice Labs booth during the event, “after introducing the CGC concept to the participants that went by the Altice Labs booth, the feedback received was quite positive highlighting the fact that CGC allows the management of several areas of a city and optimize its processes. Of the various functionalities of CGC the one that stood out was the visualization of the devices on the map and the possibility of acting on them. Also the complementarity of the projects, since the City Gateway allows to create an IoT network, where several devices (sensors) can be connected throughout the city that will be communicating with the CGC thus allowing its users to be informed about what is happening in the city and have all the information they need for decision making.”