The City of Carmel, Indiana, has modernised its wired and wirelesss smart city infrastructure with Wi-Fi 6E. The new infrastructure has been supplied by an HPE Aruba Networking solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The end-to-end wired and wireless deployment has improved public and staff mobility in support of the city’s arts scene, seasonal festivals, and other public amenities. The city is frequently rated one of the most liveable in the United States and more than 130 corporate headquarters have been attracted to the area.

The AI-powered intelligence within the solution is generating municipal operations savings of up to 50 percent.

“With mobility essential to modern life experiences, our municipality is dedicated to supplying exceptional connectivity for staff and community across indoor and outdoor spaces,” said Morgan Rinehart, Network Administrator for the City of Carmel, Indiana. “Whether its public Wi-Fi, enterprise mobility, IoT-enabled solutions, or other connected technologies, having the fast, secure, and reliable unified access delivered by HPE Aruba Networking is key to fulfilling our role.”

The City of Carmel is committed to building out its smart city infrastructure, ranging from free public Wi-Fi across 60 venues to public safety systems. These efforts will support ongoing public service innovations, such as hosting year around indoor and outdoor activities that encourage resident and visitor wellbeing.

“Innovative municipalities dedicated to providing indoor and outdoor services, regardless of the weather, require networking infrastructure engineered for environmental extremes,” said Stuart Strickland, wireless chief technology officer at HPE Aruba Networking. “Whether its gaining real-time event attendance insights, making staffing adjustments during festivals, or enabling the public to stream high-definition video to family and friends, high-performance intelligent Wi-Fi and wired networking enables the City of Carmel to deliver the exceptional smart city services that support a strong sense of community.”

To support the mobile and IoT data traffic demands that accompany smart city deployments, while minimising operating overhead, the City of Carmel adopted an AI-powered wired and wireless solution that includes the latest generation of outdoor Wi-Fi for over 95 acres of exterior spaces and Wi-Fi 6E for over a quarter million square feet of indoor facilities.

Supported by automated and streamlined CX Switching wired infrastructure, the city’s network is unified and managed with HPE Aruba Networking Central, which streamlines and simplifies administration, along with HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight (UXI), which proactively uncovers service degradations by testing end-to-end user device to network to application connectivity, before they impact experiences.

For securing its new unified network, the City worked with local partner Laketec to deploy HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass, for built-in zero trust and secure access service edge (SASE) cybersecurity, and implemented HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass Device Insight, for AI-powered intelligent device discovery and profiling. The city also rolled out Dynamic Segmentation, which combines with ClearPass and CX Switching to provide least privilege access to applications and data.

With its new infrastructure the City of Carmel is providing connectivity that boosts the productivity of municipal staff as well as supporting public amenities such as the Carmel Christkindlmarkt.

“In addition to positive feedback on the free connectivity, our new Wi-Fi 6E gets high marks internally,” said Rinehart. “This includes law enforcement and public safety staff, who report a 66 percent reduction in the time required to upload body cam, drone footage, and other video media daily.”

For IT, network intelligence has reduced deployment labour costs 30 percent, cut device configuration time 50 percent, and slashed troubleshooting time-to-resolution by another 50 percent.