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Amsterdam, June 29, 2018: An international alliance of market leaders from across the smart city, smart energy and Internet of Things (IoT) network sectors joined cities and utilities to announce they will developing an open source, multi-transport wireless networking technology and data model that will unlock these markets by eliminating the dependency on proprietary solutions.
Meeting during the IoT Tech Expo Europe in Amsterdam, the uCIFI Alliance said that smart IoT projects for managing streetlights, parking, traffic, waste collection, power grids, metering and other applications were being launched continuously by cities or utilities around the world. Despite this proliferation of projects, network owners face a hurdle to either integrate multiple proprietary systems and APIs, or deal with a dependence on single-source suppliers for network hardware or software layers.
In uCIFI, “u” stands for Utilities. “CI” stands for Cities. “uC” refers to micro-controllers in IoT devices. “
The uCIFI Alliance’s goal is to free end customers of their dependence on single-source suppliers and to drastically reduce the complexity for device suppliers and integrators to deliver data and services in a consistent manner regardless of the underlying network.
Founding industrial members of the uCIFI Alliance include Kerlink, a global leader in end-to-end network solutions dedicated to the IoT; EDMI, a worldwide leader in smart energy solutions, and Schréder, a global leader in smart street lighting. They were joined in the alliance launch by Engie and ST Engineering Electronics and pioneering end-customers, such as Sibelga (Belgium), the Brussels utility, Auckland Transport (New Zealand), and Nantes Metropole (France).
“Bringing smart technologies to the world’s municipalities and power-and-water suppliers allows tremendous efficiency in delivery of services, while dramatically increasing convenience for end users,” said Yannick Delibie, co-founder and CTIO of Kerlink. “But cities and utilities often have to untangle a host of unnecessarily complicated technical details to deploy their smart networks, which delays launch and adds cost. The uCIFI Alliance is committed to promoting simple, cost-efficient, open source wireless networking references to unlock the full potential of these smart networks.”
Based in Beaverton, Oregon, USA, the non-profit alliance will specify a unified data model and interface across multiple IoT networks, including LoRaWAN, NB-IoT and an open-source sub-GHz long-distance mesh network that shall also be specified by the alliance. This will provide both device-to-device and device-to-cloud IoT communication to cities and utilities independently from any proprietary vendor. In order to provide a truly open source implementation of the uCIFI specification, the alliance has chartered the Newticity project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Runtime, a global IoT networking provider, is leading the implementation of this free and open source wireless reference stack.