The city of Borås Stad is one of the largest municipalities in western Sweden and home to over 113,000 citizens. By Swedish law, cities like Borås Stad are required to provide critical welfare services such as education, childcare, social services, and more. Combining that with the impact of the pandemic, the 400-year-old city soon realized the need to provide its residents with more sustainable resources, while improving quality of life and driving business innovation.
The departments and institutions that power Borås Stad’s welfare services required a resilient, secure network infrastructure that could protect critical data and information. The city also needed to develop new welfare services that would depend upon reliable, high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity. Additionally, to support these services at-scale Borås Stad needed a solution that offered high visibility into network performance with reduced management complexity.
In partnership with Extreme Networks and NetNordic, Borås Stad deployed a cloud-based network to deliver new initiatives through world-class public Wi-Fi, establishing the municipality as a modern and dynamic smart city. Using ExtremeCloud IQ, the city reduced complexity of network management, streamlined operations, lowered costs, and obtained better visibility into actionable data. As a result, Borås Stad can deliver better digital experiences to sectors that enhance citizen welfare while attracting business to the city to support economic growth.
“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. 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”
Andrzej Kardas, CTO, Borås Stad
