Bristol Is Open, the pioneering project that is turning the city into a giant hi-tech laboratory, has been awarded a major global award for innovation.
The joint venture between Bristol City Council, the University of Bristol and commercial partners collected the Smart City Innovator award at the TM Forum Live! 2016. 
More than 3,500 delegates from 650 different telecommunication and digital organisations attended the four-day event held in France last week, during which the awards were presented.
Bristol is Open is an ambitious multi-million pound experiment to create a city-wide hi-tech testbed for innovation. It uses ‘big data’ to tackle a huge range of issues from traffic congestion and air pollution to crime and health.
It is developing a 30 gigabit-per-second fibre broadband network with disused cable ducting owned by the council and the university’s £12m supercomputer.
The Smart City Innovator Award ‘recognises the most innovative service breakthrough focused on positive impact to the lives of citizens, the cost of delivering services within a city and the applicability of the innovation to other cities around the world’.
Bristol Is Open managing director Paul Wilson accepted the award at the Digital World Awards.
Winning the award has already attracted interest from potential partners. It also coincides with Bristol being named as the UK’s top smart city outside London. The UK’s first Smart Cities Index – produced by Chinese information and communications giant Huawei – also classified Bristol as a leader for digital innovation.
Mr Wilson said: “This award is recognition of the innovative approach Bristol is taking to smart cities.
“The joint venture is proving to be a dynamic way to push our ‘programmable city’ activity forward. We are absolutely delighted to have received such a prestigious acknowledgement of our work on the next generation of communication networks and their impact on city management.”
Chief Technology Officer for Bristol Is Open and Professor of High Performance Networks at the University of Bristol, Dimitra Simeonidou, gave a keynote speech at the forum on using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NVF) to help create the world’s first open programmable city, with Paul Wilson providing an overview of Bristol Is Open in the smart cities track of the event.
Professor Simeonidou said: “The programmable city concept and architecture has been developed by the High Performance Networks (HPN) Group based at the university over the past few years. I am delighted that our unique technical approach and deployment of SDN/NVF technologies at a city scale has been recognised with this award.”
Bristol Is Open director of city experimentation and the council’s director of futures, Stephen Hilton, added: “This international recognition for Bristol is just reward for the efforts we are making as a city to harness the benefits of being a smart and connected city for our businesses and communities.
“The Bristol is Open team is pushing the boundaries of SDN and NVF and in so doing, they are laying the foundations for designing the digital infrastructure that will support the cities of tomorrow.”
Bristol Is Open fought off stiff global competition from other cities and large vendors operating smart city projects. However, the judges commended Bristol Is Open for its model of creating a joint venture as well as the pioneering use of SDN and NFV.
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