IT businesses vow to support Hanoi in smart city development

Vietnamese information technology (IT) and telecommunications businesses have pledged to boost the development of Hanoi’s smart city, e-government, data base of land.

This is the commitment made by the tech firms at a meeting with Hanoi's leaders and representatives from the Ministry of Information and Communications. 

Hanoi focuses on developing smart city, e-government data base of land if required.

At the meeting, Viettel, VNPT, CMC and FPT introduced their services which meet the orientations of the city’s authorities on IT and telecommunications development. 

Speaking at the meeting, Chairman of CMC Nguyen Trung Chinh hailed Hanoi’s adoption of science and technology and IT as the driving force for development. Chinh added that building Hanoi into a smart city with Al and Big Data as the core technologies is also an appropriate direction. 

“Domestic enterprises and large foreign tech groups such as Samsung fully endorse this policy,” Chinh stressed. 

With its advantages of building smart surveillance camera systems, CMC is committed to making the city’s video surveillance system smarter for the efficient operation of the whole transport system of the capital city. 

A representative from FPT said the business has piloted a smart traffic control center in Ho Chi Minh City by connecting 200 stoplights into a smart network and is implementing this model in Hanoi on trial basis.

“It would be more effective connecting all traffic control centers at district level into one city-level centralized system. However, Hanoi has not been able to allocate funding for this purpose”, said FPT representative. 

Viettel military group has considered Hanoi as its main client in the construction of telecommunications infrastructure and in the provision of solutions for its application in the fields of IT, health, education and electronic government. Viettel hoped that a smart control center model successfully implemented by the company in the central city of Hue would be replicated in Hanoi.

Support for Hanoi’s infrastructure

As the city’s digital infrastructure for smart city building has only been in its infancy, Hanoi needs to improve its essential infrastructure, such as a data storage hub, connection and a digital network for city government transactions, CMC's Chinh said.

FPT has also implemented a smart transport center for Hanoi on small scale due to lack of funding. With enough financial resources, the group would be able to implement the model citywide. In addition, it can also help Hanoi build smart hospitals and solve security issues, said FPT at the meeting. 

For its part, VNPT, another giant tech firm, said IT development for social insurance is another field in need of digitization by Hanoi and that VNPT is able to support the city in social insurance digital conversion.

The Hanoi-based group also expressed hope to cooperate with the city in building a general architecture of IT applications from the city-level to that of district and ward on social insurance.