Dynamic municipality leverages Wi-Fi 6E and AI-powered networking to help build a vibrant civic life that attracts more than 130 corporate headquarters while generating municipal operations savings of up to 50 percent

Frequently topping ‘best places to live’ indexes, the City of Carmel, Indiana, is continuing its focus on promoting quality of life by modernizing its wired and wireless networking infrastructure with a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled HPE Aruba Networking solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE).

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The City of Carmel, Indiana is committed to building out its smart city infrastructure, ranging from free public Wi-Fi across 60 venues to public safety systems. Their end-to-end wired and wireless deployment from HPE Aruba Networking improves public and staff mobility in support of the city’s thriving arts scene, numerous seasonal festivals, and other public amenities that contribute to livability. (Source: City of Carmel, Indiana)

The end-to-end wired and wireless deployment improves public and staff mobility in support of the city’s thriving arts scene, numerous seasonal festivals, and other public amenities that contribute to livability and has attracted more than 130 corporate headquarters to the area. In addition, 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.”

Smart city supports outdoor activities year-round

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

This includes a massive outdoor skating rink in its city center that is a popular winter destination and compliments shopping, dining, arts, and other surrounding entertainment options. The city also provides free public parking garages 24/7, which contributes to its goals for limiting sprawl by encouraging core population density.

“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.”

AI-powered, secure, and scalable

To answer the mobile and IoT data traffic demands that accompany smart city deployments, while minimizing 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.

Future-ready and cost-effective

With its new infrastructure the City of Carmel is providing connectivity that boosts the productivity of municipal staff as well as supporting premier public amenities such as the Carmel Christkindlmarkt, which is considered the top holiday market in the U.S., drawing visitors worldwide.

“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 labor costs 30 percent, cut device configuration time 50 percent, and slashed troubleshooting time-to-resolution by another 50 percent. This has enabled the city to re-focus IT resources on higher-value initiatives, Rinehart said.

Moving forward, the city’s IT staff is ready for whatever comes next. “HPE Aruba Networking has been a great partner,” Rinehart said. “Our new network is helping us make our city smarter, safer, and more efficient overall.”

To learn more, visit HPE Aruba Networking. For real-time news updates, follow HPE Aruba Networking on X/Twitter and Facebook, and for the latest technical discussions on mobility and HPE Aruba Networking products, visit the Airheads Community.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open, and intelligent technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com

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