Page 202 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

their services directly to the citizens. In most cases, these companies are the ones that provide the
equipment and deploy the sensors.

To help on the implementation of SSC, city service companies must learn to work with KPI based
business models and work together with municipalities in this transition. As a result, these
companies will have to increase the efficiency of their solutions, as their performance will be
quantified and evaluated. This will increase competitiveness of the service companies.

When creating their vertical solutions, city services companies should try to build these solutions in
a way that they can adapt to standard transversal platforms, so that information from all the services
can be accessed and disseminated.

A difficulty that can be encountered in some cases, especially in companies that belong to the first
group, is the lack of expertise or capacity to integrate ICTs on their processes since the "know‐how"
of these companies is usually focused on the specific service they provide. At the same time, these
companies are used to work independently in their vertical solution and the change to a more
collaborative and interdependent model of service provision is not always easy.

4.4 Utility providers

Utility providers offer services, such as electricity and gas, directly to the citizen. They usually
integrate production, distribution and commercialization aspects, which provide them with
expertise in all the different links of the value chain.

They are responsible for the deployment of smart grids, smart metering systems and deployment
of charging points for electrical vehicles, and therefore, their involvement in SSC initiatives is
essential for their success.
Utility providers cover extensive parts of the city’s territory. For this reason, the upgrade of their
systems and the inclusion of ICT in their infrastructures implies a massive rollout and requires a
considerable investment. One of the problems that they face nowadays is the morphology of the
demand curve, which has peak and valley hours with very different consumption values. In the case
of the electricity providers is complex to adapt to this curve, which is one of the issues that
constraints the development and implementation of renewable energies. With the implementation
of ICT based solutions, a smarter and sustainable network could flatten the demand curve and also
increase the predictability of the demand.

4.5 ICT companies (e.g., telecom operators, start‐ups, software

companies)

The main role of ICT companies is to provide the ICT infrastructure and solutions that will support
and integrate the services of SCC. It is important that these technological solutions are global and
standard in nature, so that different vertical solutions can be easily integrated throughout the SSC.
Due to the diversification they have experienced, Telecom operators, for example, can provide
experience and expertise on the development of the platforms needed to integrate SSC services, as
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well as on the services themselves . Because of their transversal nature, these platforms can
encourage cooperation between services, and enable the creation of efficiencies. In order to drive
the change towards SCC, ICT companies have to develop new financially sustainable business
models that guarantee the implementation of smart solutions.

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32 Informe Anual Smart Cities. Telefonica.

192 ITU‐T's Technical Reports And Specifications