Telcos' walled gardens of things

In Poland, telecoms operator Orange is building out a nationwide blockchain platform for IoT, that provides secure authentication of devices to enable a variety of smart city applications. The first use of the network is to scale up a successful pilot in the town of Olsztyn called “Rescue without Barriers” pilot, which used the technology to automatically open secure districts and barriers in hospital for immediate access by emergency services workers. The service will be expanded to some 80 municipalities.

As Orange seeks to leverage its growing IoT business, layering crypto and blockchain on top of existing authentication provides a means of continuing to lock-in public sector customers to its proprietary services for many years to come. This points towards a future where telecoms operators use blockchain to reinforce walled gardens of hardware, software, and services, rather than open them into the decentralized web that many blockchain visionaries imagined.