Where the Future Is at Home

Deutsche Telekom is making Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance a unique European T-City – with the help of ICT solutions from T-Systems. Residents, businesses, and administration are linking themselves in the cities that took second place in the competition.

Behind the slogans "mobility portal" and "Location Based Services" (LBS) are innovative services that will make life in the T-City more comfortable in many places in the very near future. The bus company in Friedrichshafen will soon be able to reliably inform passengers when the next bus will actually arrive instead of the arrival time on the bus schedule. The Location Based Services will provide day trippers and hikers with navigation assistance, weather reports, and restaurant tips.

What’s new about the T-City? - What project will be launched next? - The City Net Mobil SMS portal delivers news from the T-City, with the option of retrieving the news as an audio file.

Innovative customer service

The 4th quarter will see the launch of an exclusive T-Home Entertain service in Friedrichshafen. Triple Play – a combined phone, internet and television connection – brings a world of communication and entertainment to the town, based on IP TV. Customers in the T-City will soon enjoy the benefits of the IT Remote Service, a guaranteed immediate fault-repair service. There will be no waiting around for a technician, who will no longer have to physically visit the customer. Instead, signal or transmission faults will be rectified by the remote-management system.

Treat heart patients at home

At the Friedrichshafen Clinic a key element of the town’s core hospital-management processes will also become part of the network before the end of the year: Motiva, or mobile visits based on telemonitoring. Every day, via their home TV sets, patients suffering from cardiac insufficiency will transmit their vital signs to the doctors who are treating them in the Clinic’s cardiology department without having to leave the comfort and security of their own four walls to visit the clinic.

But it is not only the winner of the T-City competition that is driving the future forwards. The runners-up are also working on a wide range of projects to upgrade their communities.

Multimedia learning without limits

Schwäbisch-Hall is investing the prize money from the competition in its schools. – The city is networking its high schools and integrating both schools in the unique, European-wide “Edunex” e-Education project which was developed together with teachers. The district town of Neuruppin, north-west of Berlin, is investing in education as well, promoting manager training using e-Education. At the Neuruppin campus, an independent institute of UMC Potsdam, a broadband network, hardware, and software are being installed at the Knowledge and Competence Center.

Meanwhile the runner-up Kaiserslautern is expanding its internal administrative communication platform into a dual information portal in order to make city politics more transparent. And the City of Coburg in Franconia is installing an exchange platform that matches supply and demand for volunteer activities and for caretaking vacancies for senior citizens.

Read the full report about T-City in the current edition of Best Practice.