City of Ann Arbor Gains Complete Network Upgrade, Empowers Citizens and Networking Staff

The City of Ann Arbor is Michigan’s sixth largest city, located in the southeast region of the state. The municipal economy is largely driven by the University of Michigan, as well as high technology; many businesses are drawn to the area as a result of university research and development.

The city’s fiber network was 15 years old, experiencing some reliability issues, consisted of aging hardware, and a City franchise agreement with the current fiber contractor was coming to an end. The city decision makers had an opportunity to address their next generation network by continuing to lease a fiber network or build their own. The city chose to build their own community fiber network with an emphasis on quality, reliability, resiliency, and failover.

Technology Needs

• All fiber network was experiencing reliability issues 
• No redundancy was built into the network
• A hardware refresh was on the horizon

Results

• Fast, reliable network achieved
• Reduced worry among IT staff
• Network upgrade empowered people to focus on work
• Issues can be pinpointed and resolved within one hour
• Redundancy, resiliency, and failover built in to network