T-City

T-City is a project by Deutsche Telekom AG in which a selected city receives personnel, material and financial resources from Telekom to set up a high-performance telecommunications infrastructure and implement project ideas. To find a suitable T-City, the project was preceded by an ideas competition that was won by the city of Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. The project, which was originally planned to run for five years (until 2012), has the main goals of increasing the quality of life and location through the use of modern information and communication technologies and the networking of the city. In December 2011 it was decided to extend the project by three years (until 2015). The project officially ended on February 27, 2015.

Since March 2016 there is also a T-City in Croatia : Dubrovnik .

T-City Friedrichshafen

competition

The city competition began on May 31, 2006. Over 400 German cities with a population of 25,000 to 100,000 could take part. Using a two-stage process, ten finalists were selected from 52 participating cities on December 1, 2006. The focus of the competition was the entire city as an urban living space. Citizens, social groups, companies and municipal institutions were asked to put together an application. The task of this joint application was to design innovative and realizable ICT applications for their own city. On February 21, 2007, Friedrichshafen was chosen as the winner by an independent jury of eleven. The remaining nine cities in the final round ( Arnsberg , Coburg , Frankfurt (Oder) , Görlitz , Kaiserslautern , Kamp-Lintfort , Neuruppin , Osterholz-Scharmbeck and Schwäbisch Hall ) received services worth 50,000 euros each to realize a project idea. The city of Arnsberg received the jury's special prize for the best social project worth 100,000 euros for the “e-childcare” project. It was presented on March 15, 2007 by Chancellor Angela Merkel at CeBIT in Hanover.

jury

The T-City jury is made up of eleven independent jurors from different areas of society.

Volker Angres , head of the ZDF.umwelt editorial team
Jo Groebel , Director of the German Digital Institute
Harald Korb, Medical Director Personal Health Care Telemedicine Services
Gerd Landsberg , Presidium of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities
Miriam Meckel , Chair of Corporate Communication at the University of St. Gallen
Eckard Minx, former head of the “Society and Technology” research department at Daimler AG; Chairman of the Board of Management of the Daimler and Benz Foundation
Thomas Osterkorn , Editor-in-Chief Stern
Susanne Risch, Editor-in-Chief BrandEins Wissen
Herbert Schmalstieg , retired Lord Mayor D. Hanover

Hans Burghard Ziermann, Managing Director Lucent Technologies

Stephan Althoff, Head of Corporate Sponsoring at Deutsche Telekom AG

definition

In the joint project T-City, innovative information and communication applications are to be implemented for an entire city. T-City is a broad-based joint project between Deutsche Telekom AG and citizens, companies and other public and private organizations from Friedrichshafen. The project aims to show what benefits and added value innovative information and communication technologies (ICT) are already generating today and what opportunities and potential benefits still lie in them (for example through better communication options, technical simplifications, time and money savings or resource conservation). Special features of T-City are the bottom-up approach and the breadth of the project, which encompasses almost all situations and user groups.

aims

The main goals of the project are to improve the quality of life for citizens and the quality of business locations. In addition, the ICT applications implemented are intended to achieve a good network of citizens and institutions and thus an overall improved integration of the city. The focus of T-City is on the specific benefit for all users. In order to overcome the so-called digital divide , previous non - users should also get to know the new applications and continue to use them. With T-City, Telekom wants to test a new form of demand-oriented innovation management that goes beyond the supply-oriented approach of developing and launching new technologies by involving user groups from the outset.

advantages

For Friedrichshafen, the advantages include the premature expansion of the broadband infrastructure , high investments in a wide range of ICT applications, the synergy effects for business and administration and the sustainable image gain as an innovation location.

Cooperation model

With the T-City project, a long-term, comprehensive partnership between a group and an entire city, the city of Friedrichshafen, was agreed for the first time.

Telekom investments

In the T-City Friedrichshafen, Telekom initially invested in expanding the network infrastructure within the city using the latest standard ( VDSL with up to 50 Mbit / s in the fixed network and HSDPA with up to 7.2 Mbit / s in the mobile network ). In addition, it provides extensive services for the implementation, testing and communication of innovative ICT applications.

Applications

Among other things, an e-ticketing service via mobile phone for the catamaran, a public transport between Friedrichshafen and Konstanz, was tested.

In the area of e-government solutions, a potential analysis and process optimization was decided and started.

The “networked home” area represents a core area in which the electricity and broadband networks were linked for the first time. The results of the pilot project are used to further develop the solution. The installation of intelligent electricity meters in some households in the city enables users to track their energy consumption on the Internet and thus influence their personal energy balance. A developed service portal, which offers services, especially for seniors, bundled via an apartment's own touchscreen terminal, is in the test application. It is planned to also integrate telephony, IT and Entertain services .

In the field of medicine, a mobile telemedicine application for patients with heart failure was tested.

An internet-based learning platform that was tested at three schools in T-City was then put into operation. The system makes it possible to integrate multimedia learning and teaching methods as well as current content into school lessons.

Since 2009, 37 kindergartens in Friedrichshafen have been connected to a web-based portal, which simplifies the processes for allocating and organizing childcare places for parents and kindergartens.

At the beginning of 2011, the flinc ridesharing network , which focuses on dynamic ridesharing , was tested in T-City.

Further applications are being implemented.

ambassador

Twenty so-called T-City ambassadors from Friedrichshafen are available to citizens and companies as contacts and information providers about the T-City project. They come from different professional and age groups and each specialize in a certain project field. They provide information about possibilities within the project, explain the technologies and their possible applications.

Futurist

So-called futurists have existed in T-City Friedrichshafen since 2009. They have been equipped with new information and communication technologies (including telephone systems, mobile phones, Internet television, intelligent electricity meters) free of charge and try them out in their everyday lives. They are also testing various T-City projects in practice. In order to involve different groups of the city's population, six private households, two student flat shares and a kindergarten were selected by a jury as “future thinkers”.

Evaluation

The T-City project was evaluated by the Urban and Regional Research Working Group of the Geographical Institute of the University of Bonn between 2007 and 2012. The aim of the evaluation was to check the extent to which the project achieved the self-formulated goal of "increasing the quality of life and location". The final report on the evaluation was published as a book.

The project was evaluated using a mix of methods from qualitative and quantitative social research . Standardized surveys and qualitative interviews were conducted with residents and company representatives. Every year 1000 randomly selected residents of the city of Friedrichshafen and 150 company representatives were surveyed using computer-aided telephone interviews. In addition, around 30 guideline-based qualitative interviews were conducted with residents and company representatives. These surveys were supplemented by expert discussions as well as press, homepage and document analyzes. The team at the Geographical Institute was supported by an interdisciplinary scientific network.

The population's assessment of the extent to which the project has increased the quality of life in Friedrichshafen depended on various factors. Those residents who have used individual T-City projects rated the project's contribution to improving the quality of life in Friedrichshafen significantly higher than the non-users (41% vs. 25%). Men rated the contribution 40% higher than women 31% (this difference between men and women, which applies to those of the 1000 respondents who knew T-City, cannot, however, be transferred to the city as a whole, as the difference is not statistically significant (i.e. the statistical error caused by the sample is greater than the measured difference.) However, the age of the respondents is not clearly related to the evaluation. 38% of the 14 to 29 year olds (users and non-users) assumed that T-City had increased the quality of life in Friedrichshafen, the 30 to 49 year olds 34% and the 50 to 65 year olds 37 % and those over 65 to 35%.

Company representatives were 94% aware of the project. During the 2011 survey, 51% assumed that the project would significantly improve the local conditions in Friedrichshafen. A third of the companies also assumed that their own company would specifically benefit from the fact that Friedrichshafen had become T-City. In the companies too, those who had already used individual projects rated the project's contribution to the quality of the location significantly more positively than the non-users (59% vs. 30%).

The results of the qualitative research parts can be summarized as follows: Trying out functioning products or solutions led the respondents to positive assessments of a contribution made by technology to quality of life. As a rule, however, the focus was not on the technology, but on the concrete benefits for one's own everyday life (easier communication, easier organization, increased security).

Since January 1, 2009, the project has been scientifically supported on site by the Deutsche Telekom Institute for Connected Cities at Zeppelin University .

supporter

The project is also supported by the German Association of Cities and Towns (DStGB) and other partners such as Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung Electronics or Technische Werke Friedrichshafen TWF (www.twf-fn.de). The managing director of TWF, Stefan Söchtig, has been managing director of the project company for T-City Friedrichshafen since 2009. Since then, the joint venture project has gained worldwide importance.

literature

Lena Hatzelhoffer, Kathrin Humboldt, Michael Lobeck, Claus-Christian Wiegandt: Smart City in concrete terms - a future workshop in Germany between idea and practice. Evaluation of the T-City Friedrichshafen. Jovis Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86859-161-3 .

Lena Hatzelhoffer, Kathrin Humboldt, Michael Lobeck, Claus-Christian Wiegandt: Smart City in Practice - Converting Innovative Ideas into Reality. Evaluation of the T-City Friedrichshafen. Jovis Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86859-151-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

^ Announcement of the T-City extension

↑ T-City in Friedrichshafen goes into the last round

^ Deutsche Telekom: Deutsche Telekom Group opens first Smart Street in Croatia. In: www.telekom.com. Retrieved June 6, 2016 .

↑ Description of the project on the website of the Urban and Regional Research Working Group of the Geographical Institute of the University of Bonn . Retrieved October 9, 2014.

↑ Lena Hatzelhoffer, Kathrin Humboldt, Michael Lobeck, Claus-Christian Wiegandt: Smart City in concrete terms - A future workshop in Germany between idea and practice. Evaluation of the T-City Friedrichshafen . Jovis Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86859-161-3 .

↑ Scientific network of the T-City accompanying research . Website of the T-City accompanying research. Retrieved October 9, 2014.

[1] Announcement of the T-City extension

[2] T-City in Friedrichshafen goes into the last round

[3] Deutsche Telekom: Deutsche Telekom Group opens first Smart Street in Croatia. In: www.telekom.com. Retrieved June 6, 2016 .

[4] Description of the project on the website of the Urban and Regional Research Working Group of the Geographical Institute of the University of Bonn . Retrieved October 9, 2014.