Bristol is Open City Testbed

⚡ Infrastructure

🔗 Website

📡 Connectivity
🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Bristol is Open

Bristol is Open Limited was launched in April 2015 as a joint venture between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol to run a city-scale testbed for smart city technologies. It was Bristol’s vehicle in the EU–Japan BigClouT project and supplied the network, IoT and analytics infrastructure for the city’s pollution-aware walking-route pilot.

Context and problem statement

Smart city technologies are hard to evaluate in the lab. Researchers and companies need real infrastructure, real data and a willing city partner to test whether an application works at street level, and most cities have no shared platform for this.

Solution overview

Bristol is Open built a programmable, city-scale testbed funded through the government’s Super-Connected Cities programme. The council–university partnership researched software-defined networking, the Internet of Things, 5G, machine learning and CCTV analytics, and gave project partners access to the network, IoT and analytics systems they needed. For BigClouT, it supplied the infrastructure behind Bristol’s pollution-aware walking-route pilot.

Functional Scope and Features

– Fibre-optic ring linking central nodes at We The Curious, Watershed, Engine Shed and the University of Bristol
– Wide-area wireless mesh network across the city centre
– Refurbished duct network
– IoT and analytics systems available to research partners

Use Cases and Deployments

Used for Bristol’s participation in three main projects: BigClouT (IoT, cloud and big data, including pollution-aware walking routes), REPLICATE (energy efficiency and mobility) and 5G Smart Tourism (5G for CCTV, crowd analytics and event management).

Related Challenges

Household Energy Waste and Smart Energy Management

✅ Finalized

📍 Bristol, United Kingdom
⚡ Energy
Households in Bristol can face high energy costs, and unnecessary consumption — including appliances left on standby or otherwise avoidable use — adds to this burden, particularly for households already at risk of energy poverty. Bristol households need a way to see their own appliance-level energy use in a form they can act on.
Reducing Pedestrian Exposure to Air Pollution in Bristol

✅ Finalized

📍 Bristol, United Kingdom
🌳 Environment
Nitrogen dioxide levels in central Bristol regularly exceeded legal limits, and structural fixes such as a Clean Air Zone would take years. In the meantime, people walking through the city had no way to see which streets were cleaner and choose a route that lowered their own exposure.

Related Pilots

Smarter Energy – Bristol

🗓️ Starts: 2016-07-01

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🗓️ Ends: 2019-06-30
Bristol City Council and Bristol is Open, working with Lancaster University as part of the BigClouT consortium, developed a tool that forecasts household energy use and reveals hidden waste, such as standby load and peak-time demand, to help residents cut costs and avoid energy poverty.

Smart Mobility, Walkability and Air Quality in Bristol

🗓️ Starts: 2016-07-01

->

🗓️ Ends: 2019-06-30
Bristol City Council and Bristol is Open, working with Lancaster University as part of the BigClouT group, developed a pollution-aware walking route service on the BigClouT platform, which guides pedestrians along routes that avoid the most congested and polluted streets, not just the shortest ones.

Interested in this solution?

Get in touch to explore deployment opportunities or propose a complementary approach.

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