Milton Keynes

Security takes priority when it comes to the development and deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), with Gartner predicting that by 2020, IoT security will make up 20% of annual security budgets.

Milton Keynes is set to become a hi-tech city, with news that it is the first community to benefit from Gigabit-capable full fibre broadband under the new Vodafone and CityFibre Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) programme. The project will see a private investment from CityFibre of at least £40 million (€45.2943 million) into a state-of-the-art digital infrastructure for Milton Keynes.

Funny how things turn out sometimes. I was scheduled to meet Silver Spring Networks‘ exec Brian McGuigan this week at Smart Summit 2017 in London so I thought I’d do my homework on what they’d been up to lately, only to discover that they’d been taken over that day by Itron.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is arguably set to be the biggest driver of productivity and growth in the next decade, with Accenture estimating IoT could add $14.2 trillion (€11.87 trillion) to the global economy by 2030. But despite the hype and excitement, right now we seem to be a very long way from realising that

With Milton Keynes being one of the fastest growing cities in the UK and a great economic success story, the MK Data Hub was created by MK:Smart to inform smart planning and sustainable use of resources across the city and to support its continued growth.

PTC has announced that ThingWorx, a PTC technology, is joining the MK:Smart project. This is a $23,236,160 (£16 million) HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) smart-city initiative, led by the UK’s Open University, which aims to tackle barriers to economic growth in the city of Milton Keynes, UK.