03 June 2021 | Natalie Bannerman
Orange and technology company Smartkey, are partnering to deliver blockchain technology that will manage access control, smart bikes, utilities and other elements of smart cities.
Firstly, the two will extend Smartkey’s “Rescue without Barriers” pilot, which enables escue services in Olsztyn, Poland use Smartkey to gain immediate access to every secure district and building in the area, using blockchain, reducing response times.
“Smart devices are not a new idea. Already over 2 million M2M cards from Orange work, among others, in such devices throughout Poland,” said Sebastian Grabowski, director of IoT and advanced technologies at Orange.
“However, even a wide range of such devices does not create a network in itself, just as a collection of houses does not create a city. We also need an infrastructure that connects IoT technology with the end user, and this is what blockchain provides.”
Together, this will be deployed to more than 80 cities across Poland which uses Orange’s IoT solutions integrated with the Live Objects IoT platform. The Live Objects platform is already being used to manage a number of city services, including remote reading of water meters or street lighting control.
The integration of the Live Objects platform enables the ability to register devices with an Orange SIM card in the blockchain network and to generate and distribute Smart NFT access keys in the SmartKey blockchain network.
“To enable Blockchain of Things devices to operate within the smart city of the future, we created a universal communication standard to connect devices over short distances,” said Szymon Fiedorowicz, CEO and co-founder of SmartKey.
“This cooperation with Orange, the leader of urban IoT services in Poland, will help our solution become a connective tissue for smart cities and cement our role in the smart city of the future and open up a world of new possibilities of using the Internet of Things.”
The specificity of blockchain technology based on decentralised applications (dApps) and Orange network security standards prevent unauthorised use of the “virtual key”.