Extreme transforms Sweden’s Borås Stad into smart city

As part of its plans to transform into a smart city, Swedish municipality Borås Stad has engaged Extreme Networks, in partnership 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 critical welfare services such as schools, childcare, social services and elderly care, and 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 Covid-19 pandemic, Borås Stad has also worked to roll out new services, such as Wi-Fi-connected medical wristbands that allow immediate contact with doctors, real-time heartbeat monitoring, and user location information – making reliable, high-speed Wi-Fi critical for proper care.

The new infrastructure in Borås Stad is designed to deliver faster and more advanced connectivity, extending secure public Wi-Fi for its citizens, local government, 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 residents, while improving quality of life and fuelling business innovation.

Extreme says the city has seen the key benefits of advanced public Wi-Fi connectivity, streamlined network management and insightful data. As regards connectivity, Borås Stad has deployed about 3,500 ExtremeWireless Wi-Fi 6 access points to deliver reliable coverage, improved network capacity and faster data speeds across the city’s services.

As a result, said Extreme, Borås Stad can deliver seamless digital experiences in sectors such as education and healthcare, attracting businesses to the city and supporting rapid economic growth in the region.

The new infrastructure also gives 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 system. By reducing the complexity of managing the networking 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 optimise the network and leverage insightful usage trends to improve consumer experiences.

Borås Stad chief technology officer Andrzej Kardas said: “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. Leveraging Extreme’s solutions, we have 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 at our end. We are proud to have established Borås Stad as a modern and dynamic smart city.”

Boris Germashev, senior regional director Northern and Eastern Europe at Extreme Networks, added: “Borås Stad was struggling to provide its growing population with fast and reliable public Wi-Fi, resulting in connectivity issues that absorbed a lot of the IT team’s time. Borås Stad has proved 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 now established a strong and functional network to provide the best possible public service benefits for its users.”