Press Releases

• Smart Parking reinforces mobility in the Municipality of Cascais

Vodafone Portugal moves forward with a NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) pioneer project in the Municipality of Cascais through Cascais Próxima, which will allow whoever visits the village or lives there to find the available parking spots in real time in the main arteries of the county.

The Smart Parking solution, developed for Cascais Próxima, covers Praia de Carcavelos and Boca do Inferno. This solution is embedded in MobiCascais’ ecosystem, allowing the users of MobiCascais’ app to identify empty spots in the monitored areas.

This solution was designed with two distinct technologies that answer to the different needs of the reached zones: the NB-IoT sensors at Boca do Inferno have the particularity of being hidden underground and, as such, aren’t visible; the smart cameras will be installed at Praia de Carcavelos and, besides monitoring the available spots, will allow the control of wrongly-parked cars.

This project reinforces Cascais’ leading position in the adoption of new technologies, positioning the county as a “smart city”.

NB-IoT is a new transmission technology that is quickly accelerating, with clear benefits for companies, cities and citizens. NB-IoT has innumerous advantages, such as the safety in massive connection of IoT devices, longest useful life of batteries and equipments and, consequently, higher longevity, low implementation costs for big geographic areas or urban infrastructures and long-range coverage.

MobiCascais is Municipality of Cascais’ app, which supports an innovative integrated mobility strategy for the whole county, allowing visitors or citizens to acquire and use, in a simple way, many mobility services, such as sharing and parking of bikes, public transports and parking lots.

“Vodafone Group’s leadership position in IoT, with a worldwide management of almost 81 million cards, is the guarantee stamp for the growing demand for NarrowBand IoT projets in the Portuguese entrepreneurial sector”, says Paula Carioca, CBU Director at Vodafone Portugal.

“The implementation of a NB-IoT network and a network of smart cameras for the Smart Parking service will allow an increase in the quality of Cascais Próxima’s services, through a significant decrease in the time spent and in the travel costs for identifying the parking spots that are available in MobiCascais app. In the short-run, new services such as Car Sharing and use of scooters will be available in this app. Cascais estimates that this technology may extend, in the medium-term, to about 10 000 parking spots inside the Municipality” mentions Miguel Pinto Luz, Vice-President of Cascais’ City Council.

IoT is becoming a priority for the entrepreneurial sector day by day and, according to Vodafone Group’s IoT Barometer, disclosed this week, more than one third of the enterprises are using Internet of Things (IoT), from which 70% have already concluded their pilots and 95% state that are receiving return on the investment.

Vodafone’s strong bet on innovation is a sign of technological leadership and quality of resources and national infrastructures, strongly contributing to the distinctions for which the Group has been recognized worldwide.

For the past five years, Vodafone has been classified as “leader” in Internet of Things at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Services Management in the categories “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision”.