Cloud-managed network advances Swedish municipality’s smart city plans

Borås Stad is working with Extreme Networks and NetNordic to provide advanced connectivity and secure public wifi while simplifying network management for the IT team.

Borås Stad has deployed approximately 3,500 wi-fi access points

The municipality of Borås Stad is advancing its plans to become a smart city with one of the largest cloud-managed network installations in Sweden.

Extreme Networks worked with systems integrator NetNordic to establish the network to provide more advanced connectivity and secure public wifi for citizens, local government, schools, and services, while automating and simplifying network management for the IT team.

Critical services

Municipalities in Sweden are required by law to provide critical welfare services such as schools, childcare, social services, and elderly care. The departments and institutions that power these services require a robust, secure network infrastructure to share information seamlessly and securely.

As a result of the global pandemic, Borås Stad has also worked to roll out new services, such as wifi connected medical wristbands, which allow immediate contact with doctors, real-time heartbeat monitoring, and user location information.

The ExtremeCloud IQ platform claims to reduce the complexity of network management, streamlines operations, lowers maintenance costs, and provides visibility into actionable data and insights from network usage to performance.

“Extreme Networks has been a key partner in helping us to build a smart city that meets the current and future demands of our citizens,” said Andrzej Kardas, chief technology officer, Borås Stad. “Leveraging Extreme’s solutions, we’ve created an advanced cloud-managed network that helps us roll out new initiatives through seamless, world-class public wifi – with minimal overhead, management, and maintenance required on our end.

“We’re proud to have established Borås Stad as a modern and dynamic smart city.”

“We’ve created an advanced cloud-managed network that helps us roll out new initiatives through seamless, world-class public wi-fi – with minimal overhead, management, and maintenance required on our end”

Borås Stad has deployed approximately 3,500 ExtremeWireless Wi-Fi 6 Access Points to deliver reliable coverage, improved network capacity, and faster data speeds across the city’s services. ExtremeCloud IQ provides the city’s IT staff full oversight of its network infrastructure, enabling nearly all operations to be accessed and viewed in a single cloud network management solution.

By reducing the complexity of managing the networking infrastructure, the three-person engineering team can scale, manage, and maintain all of the access points and millions of connected devices. Additionally, ExtremeAnalytics enables the team to optimise the network and gain insightful usage trends to improve consumer experiences.

“Borås Stad was struggling to provide its growing population with fast and reliable public wifi, resulting in connectivity issues that absorbed a lot of the IT teams’ time,” said Boris Germashev, senior regional director, northern and eastern Europe, Extreme Networks.

“But with the deployment of ExtremeCloud IQ, Borås Stad has proven that with the right cloud-managed network and solutions, a city can cost-efficiently streamline all networking operations, increase connectivity, and enhance services without complicating its fundamental infrastructure. Borås Stad has established a strong and functional network to provide the best possible public service benefits for its users.”