It stands for “Metropolitan Area Network” and has already been approved and partly carried out by several municipalities in the Emilia-Romagna region. Free WI-FI, massive video surveillance and environmental monitoring the focal points.
What will the city of the future be like? Waiting for flying cars and skateboarding levitation, as the most nostalgic lovers of return to the future will remember, here comes the “PROJECT MAN”, Or “Metropolitan Area Network”. Focal point is the construction of a fibre optic network with which to connect the entire fabric of the city with the end user, to provide a high and efficient quality of life, eliminating unnecessary costs produced by increasingly old technologies.
What is the project?
Already adopted by several municipalities in Emilia-Romagna region through the design curated by the agency Lepida Spa to which the regional authority has entrusted the task, of this ambitious project of Smart city is discussed at the last meeting on innovation “Smart Land Italia 30.0” of Cesena last March 29th, thanks to the intervention of Giovanni Battistini, director of “Energies for the city-Cesena”.
Data and services that whizzing online at high speed thanks to a super fast fibre-optic connection, perfect to connect in real time municipal offices, public schools and law enforcement for example. But not only that.
The project also includes a massive installation of surveillance cameras that can monitor all sensitive areas and not only. The environment will also be at the centre of this programme of interventions: latest generation instrumentation for the monitoring of air quality, vehicular flows and the employment of parking stalls. It will be essential to participate, through public calls, of companies that will manage parts of the infrastructure in order to offer an increasingly efficient and competitive service to the citizen.
Bologna is the lead city of the project, followed in parallel by municipalities such as Cesena, and Modena .
Also if there are many other municipal administrations about to adopt the plan, at least in the center-north. Approved by the City council Felsineo already in 2012, the project involves the installation of 327 access points, 260 km of connections and 41k total km of fibre optic that have already allowed the network connection of all the offices of the public administration, the university, the research institutions, the health and other state agencies including the municipal libraries and hyperbole, the network of the municipal administration.
Free Wi-Fi and no passwords throughout the city so at very reasonable cost. It is estimated that the total expenditure for the city’s coverage was 3 million and 946thousand euros, of which 1 million and 980thousand invested by the capital of Emilia-Romagna although, according to the administration itself, will allow to save 600 thousand euros a year by cutting on contracts to telephone companies and optimizing consumption.