ACUD

The Administrative Capital for Urban Development (ACUD) is the master developer of Egypt’s new capital city – a purpose-built smart metropolis located 35–60 km east of Cairo. Covering 725 km² and planned to accommodate up to seven million inhabitants, the city represents a bold step in Egypt’s national digital transformation and urban-development strategy.

As a greenfield project designed to “connect everything”, ACUD set out to create a fully digital ecosystem integrating communications, utilities, data centre and city services. To achieve this, it needed a convergent BSS/OSS platform capable of managing millions of users and devices, supporting multiple service domains, and enabling a broad ecosystem of partners to innovate and deliver value-added services.  

This project with ACUD and Orange is an opportunity to build digital infrastructure for a smarter future for Cairo. We are working in close collaboration with Cerillion and Orange to deliver a solution to ACUD in line with its unique requirements, and are confident that ACUD will be able to provide a world-class solution for its users with market-leading IoT use cases.

Hani Adel
Head of Customer Business Team for Orange MENA at Nokia

The Challenges

Building a smart city from the ground up required an entirely new operational model. ACUD needed to:

• Manage multiple service types – from fibre connectivity and data-centre services to utilities and city operations – through a unified catalogue and billing environment.
• Support retail and wholesale business models within the same framework, reflecting the city’s hybrid role as both a service provider and an enabler of other providers.
• Deliver transparent, flexible billing for individuals, families and enterprises, including rolled-up and split invoicing.
• Enable rapid onboarding of third-party providers and seamless integration with partner systems through Open APIs.
• Deliver a world-class digital experience for residents and enterprises ordering, activating and paying for services online.

The Solution

Working in collaboration with Nokia and Orange, Cerillion was selected to provide the core digital-services platform underpinning ACUD’s smart-city operations.

Built on open standards and a modular, cloud-neutral architecture, the Cerillion solution unifies retail, enterprise and wholesale services within a single environment. It provides a common product and service catalogue, convergent billing, integrated CRM and account management, and a TM Forum compliant API-driven integration layer to connect partner systems, IoT platforms and external applications.

A central network inventory underpins service qualification and activation, maintaining an accurate, end-to-end view of ACUD’s fibre network. This enables precise resource planning, faster service provisioning, and improved control of infrastructure assets – essential in a city built entirely on digital connectivity.

The platform also manages digital IDs, ensuring that every account – whether individual, family or organisation – can be managed consistently across all service domains.