HPE: Jamshedpur, India - From steel city to smart city

Tata Communications, a provider of telecommunications solutions and services, has 44 data centers located around the world, including India and Singapore. 

HPE and Tata Communications announced at Mobile World Congress, less than three months ago, a new relationship enabling the world's largest LoRa network deployment, initially targeting over 400 million people.

Three months is a long time in the Internet of Things (IoT) world for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Tata Communications. Of late, we have been busy creating the world's next first. This time we focused on 'Command and Control'.

Today, we're proud to share our latest news, HPE and Tata Communications have implemented the world's first LoRaWAN based Integrated City Management.

Jamshedpur, India. Truly taking a Steel City and transforming it into one of the regions first Smart Cities.

LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification for wireless battery operated IoT devices, targeting key IoT requirements such as secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization services. It is being adopted as a standard for connecting LPWAN IoT devices and sensors, complementing other connectivity options such as LTE, Wi-Fi and more.

Back in February, at Mobile World Congress, we announced that Tata Communications selected HPE's Universal IoT (UIoT) Platform to help connect devices, applications and other IoT solutions over the LoRa network in smart buildings, campus, utilities, fleet management, security and healthcare services across more than 2,000 communities.

Today, we're working with JUSCO, a Tata Group Enterprise, to roll out the first Smart City Command Center based on LoRaWAN standards in Jamshedpur, India.

Essentially, Jamshedpur Utility Services Company (JUSCO) will be aggregating a diverse spectrum of field sensors, gateways and devices, and integrating multiple data sources to be seamlessly managed by JUSCO.

We'll be using more than 100,000 sensors and gateways to digitize 15 infrastructure solutions including street lights, utilities and parking meters, all managed by HPE's UIoT Platform.

In addition to improving basic utility functionality, aggregating all this nascent information into one center, the Smart City Command Center, will allow JUSCO to easily manage, maintain and monetize new services. The goal – to help reduce the city's energy use, increase efficiency for waste management and make construction zones safer, among other benefits.

The work in Jamshedpur is underway now, and will continue for the next 12-18 months until all necessary devices and sensors are connected to the HPE UIoT Platform.

This signals so much more to come. As Smart Cities evolve, new use cases and requirements are accelerating. The use cases are only limited by our imagination.

Digitization changes how we see problems and opportunities. Our citizen's needs are changing, from transport, where we choose to live, what services we require and want issues are important for our own unique cities.

These changes bring opportunity to us all and HPE and Tata Communications are seizing on the new opportunities to innovate rapidly, try new things, and fail if we must, but fail fast and learn from the failures.

Article by ​Nigel Upton, general manager, Universal IoT Platform, HPE