A smart city is a cost-efficient city

With approximately 113.000 citizens, Borås is one of the biggest municipalities in the Västra Götaland County in western Sweden. The first thing you’ll probably notice after googling it will be the city’s coat of arms depicting two pairs of sheep shears. It is a tribute to the vast number of smiths and textile workers in the town in early history. The Textile Town, as it’s nicknamed, currently holds the Swedish record in the number of established mail-order firms. Talk about times before the Internet!

But times change, and so do the needs of local communities and governments.

“In Sweden, municipalities are responsible by law for providing critical welfare services such as schools, childcare, social services, elderly care, targeted efforts for people with disabilities and, in some cases, healthcare, as well as issues crucial for the environment and a well-functioning city such as environmental protection, waste management, water supply, and emergency services”, says Albert Kiippa, Account Manager at Extreme Networks.

In fact, the biggest employer in Borås Stad is… Borås Stad itself.

“Usually, municipalities in Sweden are giving jobs to approximately 10% of their local populations. When you walk into a bar in Borås, one out of ten people you see there is working for the city hall or one of the municipal companies”, says Claes Otterdahl, unit manager at IT Department at Borås Stad. “We’ve got 16 departments in the city. Our technical office doesn’t receive any money from the local government. Instead, we have to earn it like a regular company by selling IT services and taking care of the network infrastructure for schools, care homes, libraries, theaters, public transport and the city hall itself”, he goes to add.

In order for all these departments and institutions to operate smoothly and exchange data between each other in a safe and efficient manner, a robust and secure network infrastructure is a must. And with the exponential growth of access points and connected devices, you simply have to find ways to streamline and automate network management. Needless to say, local governments’ budgets are rarely unlimited, especially now in the times of pandemic.

Cut coat according to cloth, one would say. Luckily, the IT department at Borås Stad came up with a solution that would revolutionize the way the city’s networks are run and operated.

“Up until 2012 we had a Cisco based solution in place. Unfortunately, it started to grow too expensive for us. All the software licenses, support agreements, the 6509 core switches… really costly pieces of equipment. So we started to look for alternatives”, says Andrzej Kardas, CTO at Borås Stad. “We had resources to invest in the network. We bought 2000 access points, switches and everything else we needed from Extreme. That’s how it all began”, he adds.

But investing in new equipment was one thing. The other one was how to manage the whole system.

“We did try the Cisco Prime management tool but it was a real challenge for us to make it work like we wanted it to. We tried and tried, but to no avail. During the modernization we decided to switch to the Netsight solution which is now better known as Extreme Management Center”, Claes Otterdahl admits. “That was a game-changer because we could administrate everything much, much easier, freeing our technicians’ precious time”, Andrzej Kardas adds.

It was not until that moment that the IT department at Borås Stad realized that with the new solution in place, it’d be much easier to change the entire network.

“The reason we got into Extreme was because our partner, NetNordic, basically predicted what was going to happen in the Gartner’s magic quadrants and which company will be able to provide us with a better system of access points and switches, and at a better price to boot”, says Claes Otterdahl. Andrzej Kardas adds: “At the time of the investment we had Aerohive equipment for the wi-fi and Extreme products on the network side. Today it is one and the same company with a unified offer of ExtremeWireless access points and switches. And we can already feel the benefits of that”.

Cities are like living organisms and their need for connectivity is evolving rapidly. To visualize the scale of growth, let’s just crunch some numbers. The Borås Stad’s network infrastructure grew from around 500 access points back in the Cisco days before 2012 to approximately 3500 APs used in the city today. The important thing here? It’s still being managed by a team of just three engineers.

The change is perhaps most easily seen in the education sector. Today there are 55 schools and kindergartens with somewhere around 19 000 pupils under the IT department’s care. In the last 10 years, the number of computers that should have access to the wireless network has more than doubled. Not to mention that starting from the 4th grade, an average student in Sweden uses one or even two connected devices, e.g. a smartphone and an iPad given by the school for the purpose of education.

Quite a network on its own…

“Prior to the modernization project we had some hard time managing all that. Netsight, and subsequently Extreme Management Center, literally changed everything, allowing us to see what was going on in the network and take proper action in time”, explains Andrzej Kardas. “What’s also important is that shifting from Ethernet cables to wi-fi made it easier for us and allowed us to keep the costs of switches and installations down”, he adds.

“Advancing the schools’ networks also meant that we needed a solution to authenticate each pupil connecting to the wi-fi. Back in the day, students used to get disconnected quite often and needed to log into the network again and again. The problem was not wi-fi, but the way students were connecting with their devices”, says Claes Otterdahl. “We tried a number of different solutions for the user authentication, but the first one to meet our expectations was the ExtremeCloud A3”, he adds.

They say that in Sweden, the municipalities support their citizens throughout their entire life: from early childhood and education up to the elderly age and a system of care homes and services. The latter faces its own challenges regarding the IT infrastructure.

According to the Swedish government’s forecasts, the number of employees in the care sector will be dwindling in the years to come. This is in turn will lead to a growing need for remote care solutions, such as wi-fi connected medical wristbands which allow immediate contact with the doctors, real-time heartbeat monitoring and user location.

“For the last 2 years we have been developing this project of implementing Extreme based wi-fi at every care home in the city. There’s a lot of things that’s going to be connected, but the real goal is to allow elderly people to leave homes, go to the park without being afraid of not being able to call for help”, explains Andrzej Kardas. “In order to achieve that, everything needs to work as smooth as possible. The solution from Extreme allows peace of mind to both our eldest citizens and us, the administrators”, he adds.

Every network administrator knows that there are only so much access points that can be managed with an on-premises solution. After a certain point, network management consumes so much resources that it simply becomes unviable. That is what pushed Borås Stad decided towards the cloud.

“We have been using ExtremeCloud IQ for the last 7 months, and I have to say: it was the right choice”, says Claes Otterdahl. “Frankly, up to that point everything was working good. Now it is working *perfect*”, adds Andrzej Kardas. “We have never had a better performance, the time that we’d normally spend working around such number of access points in an on-prem solution can be used elsewhere. It’s a win-win”, Borås Stad’s CTO admits with a smile.

As one of the biggest ExtremeCloud IQ installations in Sweden, Borås Stad sets a shining example of how the right solution can streamline virtually all network operations. But there’s another lesson to be learned here.

“Every municipality in Sweden needs to be self-sustaining when it comes to public services. While our team is rather big, because there’s 50 of us, IT departments in smaller municipalities often have difficult time covering all the services that are required, especially with smaller budgets”, says Claes Otterdahl.

“The story of Borås Stad proves that with the right Extreme solution, local governments not only can increase network performance and insights in the crucial areas, but also reduce the maintenance costs and complexity of their networks, regardless of the number of people being in charge of them. A smart city at its finest”, Albert Kiippa sums up.