Extreme turns Sweden’s City of Borås into a smart city
As part of its plans to transform into a smart city, the Swedish municipality of Borås City has engaged Extreme Networks, in collaboration with NetNordic, to establish what is claimed to be one of the largest cloud-managed network infrastructures.
Municipalities in Sweden are required by law to provide important welfare services such as schools, childcare, social services and elderly care, and the departments and institutions that run these services require a robust, secure network infrastructure to share information seamlessly and securely.
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the City of Borås has also worked to roll out new services, such as Wi-Fi-connected medical wristbands that enable immediate contact with doctors, real-time heart rate monitoring and user location information – which makes it reliable, high speed Wi-Fi crucial for proper care.
The new infrastructure in Boras city is designed to deliver faster and more advanced connectivity, expand secure public Wi-Fi for its citizens, local authorities, schools and services, while automating and simplifying network management for the IT team. The transition to a smart city is also intended to provide more sustainable resources to the residents, while improving the quality of life and benefiting business innovations.
Extreme says the city has seen the key benefits of advanced public Wi-Fi connectivity, streamlined network management and insightful data. In terms of connectivity, the City of Borås has distributed approximately 3,500 ExtremeWireless Wi-Fi 6 access points to deliver reliable coverage, improved network capacity and faster data speeds over the city’s services.
As a result, said Extreme, the City of Borås can deliver seamless digital experiences in sectors such as education and healthcare, attract companies to the city and support rapid economic growth in the region.
The new infrastructure also gives the city’s IT staff a full overview of its network infrastructure, which means that almost all businesses can be reached and viewed in a single cloud network management the system. By reducing the complexity of managing network infrastructure, the three-person engineering team can scale, manage and maintain more than 3,500 access points and millions of connected devices. The team can also optimize the network and take advantage of insightful usage trends to improve consumer experiences.
Borås City Technical Director Andrzej Kardas said: “Extreme Networks has been a key partner to help us build a smart city that meets our citizens’ current and future requirements. With the help of Extreme’s solutions, we have created an advanced cloud-managed network that helps us roll. “We are proud to have established the City of Borås as a modern and dynamic smart city.”
Boris Germashev, senior region director Northern and Eastern Europe at Extreme networks, added: “The City of Borås struggled to provide its growing population with fast and reliable public Wi-Fi, which resulted in connection problems that took up much of the IT team’s time. The City of Borås has proven that with the right cloud-managed networks and solutions, a city cost-effectively streamline all network operations, increase connectivity and improve services without complicating their basic infrastructure.
The City of Borås has now established a strong and functioning network to provide the best possible societal benefit for its users.