KT will install the air quality monitoring solutions at telephone poles, base stations and phone booths
South Korean telecommunications firm KT Corp confirmed plans to invest 10 billion won ($8.9 million) to set up air quality monitoring solutions at its telephone poles and base stations nationwide with an aim to provide more accurate data on air conditions, Korean press reported.
The Asian telco said it launched the massive “Air Map Korea” project to collect air quality data by installing monitors at its nationwide infrastructure including 4.5 million telephone poles, 330,000 mobile base stations, 60,000 public phone booths, and 4,000 central offices in Korea.
During the first phase of the project, KT will install air quality monitors at its 1,500 main telecom service stations in major seven cities including Seoul; it will start measuring the quality of air in the first quarter of next year.
The telco said that the IoT-based air quality monitoring sensors can measure fine dust, volatile organic compounds, noise and humidity level in minutes. For the initial trial phase, KT will select a place where air quality can be measured most effectively, leveraging big data analysis, until the end of the year. The collected data will be provided to the government through access of an open IoT platform.
Currently, the Korean government is checking fine dust concentration level on a per-hour basis via 300 air quality monitors nationwide.
KT already signed an agreement to install air pollution monitoring networks with the Jeju provincial government in April of this year. The telco said that the monitoring network will be deployed using base stations, public telephone booths, telecommunications poles, local community centers and bus stops, among others.
MTN uses IoT to monitor rhino behavior via IoT
In other IoT news, South African operator MTN is using IBM IoT software services and an analytics system from Wageningen University, in the Netherlands to combat rhino poaching via its MTN Connected Wildlife platform, with a pilot scheme in progress at South Africa’s Welgevonden game reserve.
As part of this pilot project, rhinos are fitted with collars containing sensors which transmit data about their behavior to the IoT platform, via a LoRaWAN network server, backhauled by MTN’s 3G/4G network.
The African telco said that the system is also designed for use with other animals including zebra, wildebeest, eland and impala, and MTN intends to expand it to other game reserves across the country.
