15 September 2020

Bristol-is-Open is a project for smart city experimentation in technology and citizen engagement, jointly backed by Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol. The city was  recognised as the UK’s leading smart city based on the UK Smart Cities index 2017. Then, in 2018, Bristol-is-Open was recognised with the Glomo Smart Cities Award. 

Zeetta Networks, a local university spin-out company, has worked closely with Bristol-is-Open using NetOS to manage its smart city network infrastructure.

Bristol-Is-Open’s backbone network uses the council-owned fibre-optic network to link several nodes around the city. A variety of wireless access networks branch out from the core fibre network to deliver user data rates up to 1 Gbps using a combination of Wi-Fi, LTE Advanced and – in the future - other more advanced wireless access technologies such as 60 GHz wireless.

Distributed sensors across the city supply the network with information about many aspects of city life including energy, air quality, temperature, humidity and traffic flows. University of Bristol’s  supercomputing and cloud resources are also connected to the core fibre network to host and analyse information flows, in real-time, providing open, accessible data for the development of a wide range of applications and services to improve the modern urban living and explore solutions on a city-wide scale.

Bristol-is-Open needed a network control and management platform that allowed simplified network operations and programmability to enable smart city experimentation.

NetOS had to support multiple technologies including optical and packet switches, Wi-Fi and a city-wide IoT network.

Flexibility was key for Bristol-is-Open, the ability to set-up and tear-down experiments required the rapid reconfiguration capabilities of NetOS.

Barney Smith, CEO of Bristol-Is-Open says Zeetta Networks’ technology is pioneering in the world of SDN and NFV technology”. 

Vassilis Seferidis, CEO of Zeetta Networks adds: “Bristol is leading the way in implementing cutting-edge networking technologies to tackle large-scale urban problems. The ability of Zeetta’s NetOS to virtualize and slice different types of network resources including optical, packet and wireless is the catalyst for the exploration of such opportunities.”

Bristol-is-Open  is part of the EU funded Horizon 2020 project 5G-REPLICATE.