Extreme Networks in the state and local government sector: enabling smart city initiatives while protecting IT budgets

Cities around the world are undergoing digital transformation to achieve better environmental, social and financial outcomes. By linking devices, applications and people to streamline communal and public functions, both local authorities and state government agencies have the power to enhance communications and provide better services to citizens, thus improving people’s lives and safety.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. The sheer amount of responsibility and the amount of work that needs to be done on a daily basis with a (more often than not) limited budget can put the brakes on any digital transformation journey.

“Municipalities are increasingly becoming an information factory. We now use and manage about 700 applications and offer employees a broad range of IT services, including telephony and workplace management. Unsurprisingly, managing information has grown more and more diverse and complex for us”, says Clemens Garritsen, Head of ICT at the Dutch municipality of Breda, which is running the IT and network for all 40 municipal locations, servicing around 3700 end users.

One of the key attributes to help local and state government bodies implement their smart city initiatives are high performance wireless networks that support the rapidly growing needs in terms of network bandwidth and capacity. Let’s take a look at a Swedish municipality of Borås Stad which enables digital services for more than 30,000 users in schools, care homes, libraries, theaters, public transport, waste treatment plant, emergency services and the city hall, among others.

Now, did you know that in the last 10 years, the number of computers that need to have access to the wireless network has more than doubled in the Borås Stad’s schools? Also, starting from the 4^th grade, an average student in Sweden uses two connected devices, e.g. a smartphone and a school iPad for education. Speaking of mobility: Borås Stad has also worked to roll out new services, such as Wi-Fi connected medical wristbands which allow immediate contact with doctors, real-time heartbeat monitoring, and user location information – making reliable, high-speed Wi-Fi critical for proper care.

Reflecting the growing needs, Borås Stad’s network infrastructure grew from around 500 access points back in 2012 to approximately 3500 APs in 2022. Needless to say, local governments’ budgets are rarely unlimited, especially in times of pandemic. That’s why the new Wi-Fi 6 access points from Extreme Networks not only delivered reliable coverage, improved network capacity, and faster data speeds across the city's services, but also helped the municipality optimize the operating costs.

“(…) Our partner, NetNordic, basically predicted (…) 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, vice manager at IT Department at Borås Stad. “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”, says Andrzej Kardas, CTO at Borås Stad.

Network performance is one thing – being able to deploy it and manage it in an easy way is quite another. To simplify and increase the level of automation of the network, leading to increased efficiency and reduced costs, the municipality of Breda based its entire data center infrastructure on Extreme Fabric Connect – a market-leading SPB technology.

“Extreme's fabric technology makes deploying both temporary and permanent infrastructure faster and more cost-effective. (…) IT administrators perform far less configurations in fewer places, which saves us a lot of work. Essentially, the network does a lot by itself. Fabric also minimizes the risk of errors due to misconfigurations, thus increasing network availability and uptime. Changes take less time, so we can focus on other, more strategic tasks”, says Roger Lahaye, ICT Architect working at the city of Breda.

Another example: FPS Justice, a Federal Public Service of Belgium which provides both administrative and operational support for legislation, courts, and prison system, also needed a scalable and reliable network solution to streamline complex network management and increase operational efficiency and security across its 240 locations. Today, Extreme Fabric Connect provides the organization with a simplified, agile, and resilient infrastructure that can be managed by just one person instead of three, like in the past.

 “(…) We have been able to meet the objective to improve information-sharing and offer new digital services. Our new network is truly a game changer for the way our justice system operates”, says Jimmy De Laet, says ICT Infrastructure director at FPS Justice.

The solution creates a self-healing autonomic networking architecture that allows FPS Justice to perform upgrades and sub-second recovery of real time traffic without any degradation of service or performance. Additionally, the hyper-segmentation and stealth networking functions allowed for the logical separation of consumer IoT devices from the justice system’s corporate technologies and assets, providing much needed inherent network security.

State and local government bodies are on a digital transformation journey with the ultimate goal of becoming a smart city. But… what does this buzzword actually mean? While the exact definition may vary, the usual goal of a smart city is to increase its operational efficiencies, drive economic growth, and improve both the quality of government services and citizen welfare by leveraging advanced technology and data analysis.

In other words, being smart is not about how much technology you have, but rather what you choose to do with it. So with the gradual growth of IT infrastructure, access points and connected devices like in the Borås Stad’s case, you simply have to find ways to streamline network management and reduce the complexity and operating costs related to the network. That is why the municipality decided to fully embrace cloud-managed networking by implementing the award-winning ExtremeCloud IQ platform.

“That was a game-changer because we could administrate everything much, much easier, freeing our technicians’ precious time (…) 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”, says Andrzej Kardas.

The solution has also given 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. Today, the 3-person engineering team is able to scale, manage, and maintain over 3,500 access points and millions of connected devices with ease. Additionally, the ExtremeAnalytics tool enables Andrzej Kardas and his colleagues to leverage actionable data and insights from network usage to further optimize and improve user experiences.

At Extreme, our industry leading, best in class network infrastructure provides the perfect groundwork to municipalities for achieving digital transformation and ultimately becoming a smart city. However, we know that becoming a smart city is a journey. Successful transformation requires looking to the future and taking the necessary steps to make the process seamless.