Telecommunications giant Orange and technology company SmartKey have created the first Blockchain of Thing (BoT) SIM card to implement access control and other smart city functions on a mobile phone. Thanks to the new partnership, access control, smart bikes, utilities and other smart city elements will soon be available to manage through blockchain technology.
The partnership is based on the SmartKey pilot program “Rescue without Barriers”, which allows the Olsztyn city rescue services in Poland to have instant access to each safe area and building in their district using blockchain. The technology enables hospital barriers and other gates to automatically unlock and open for rescue vehicles, thereby reducing response times. This is one example of many possible access control features based on blockchain and connectivity in the licensed operator’s band, setting the scene for Orange as the first global operator to use blockchain to promote the smart cities of the future.
The technology will be launched in more than 80 Polish cities that are already taking advantage of Orange smart city facilities and will be integrated with the global Live Objects IoT platform, which is based one blockchain technology. This platform is used to manage various urban services, such as remote reading of water meters and control of street lighting.
The combination of blockchain technology, decentralized applications (dApps) and Orange’s network security standards prevent the illegal use of a “virtual key”. Together with the flexibility of SmartKey technology, this architecture may be effectively used in a variety of urban and commercial services.
Sebastian Grabowski, Director of IoT and Advanced Technologies at Orange, commented: “Smart devices are not a new idea. Already over 2 million M2M cards from Orange work, among others, in such devices throughout Poland. 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.”
