MWC2010: NTT DoCoMo’s sensor network
Japan’s NTT DoCoMo revealed at Mobile World Congress that it has started a project to put environmental sensors on their base stations to gather climate and air quality information. Each of the nodes will feature an sensor that gathers information such as air quality, the intensity of UV light from the sun, atmospheric conditions and temperature, a DoCoMo spokesperson said.
One of the first purposes for the sites will be to measure the amount of pollen in the air to warn against hay fever, a condition that is deemed ‘critical’ by the operator.
The sensor system has already been deployed at 300 sites in Tokyo, with 2,500 sites set for deployment across the country within fiscal 2010 ending March 2011. Eventually, 9,000 sites will be deployed nationwide, according to DoCoMo.
The sensors will not only be deployed at DoCoMo’s base station sites, but also at stores, schools, hospitals and other accessible sites. Additional sensor types will be deployed depending on the requirements of different applications, DoCoMo said.
According to the spokesperson, the operator is not developing services on top of that sensor network, but instead will gather the information, relay it over its 3G network and then store it in a database for applications developers, presumably at a price.
While the solution itself doesn’t reduced the environmental of the telecoms equipment itself, it is certainly an example of the telecoms network, including the physical sites themselves, can be deployed to develop applications that are beneficial to society. With DoCoMo initially, that might simply be preventing hay fever for the Japanese masses, but the potential of such a network to improve the management of buildings, logistics and healthcare are clearly evident.
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- Telefonica and Vodafone pen massive European network sharing deal
- MWC2010: Vodafone’s Green Tech programme
- MWC2010: Samsung’s green wall
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Category: Applications, Climate change, Green ICT, Mobile
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