Amarante - Municipal Mesh WiFi HotSpots Network
Case Studies |
Cities get Mesh Wi-Fi networks for inhabitants and visitors free and mobile Internet access |
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Objective |
The city council desired to promote the city tourism as well as to provide free internet access to the sites most frequently attended by the young population promoting the e-inclusion. Also it was a goal to get the council closer to the citizens and to get feedback statistics about the service. |
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Challenge |
Typical approaches would make use of ADSL supported Wi-Fi access points and possibly completely open access to the service without registration, which would turn the OPEX cost getting higher as the dimension of the hotspots network was also higher. |
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Solution |
A Mesh Wi-Fi network was deployed, providing a private network, keeping all the Acess Point inexpensively connected to the City Council datacenter and, sharing a single access to the internet. A hotspot gateway was installed and customized to provide vouchers, login/password, automatic registration, access control and statistics. |
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Other Applications |
Wi-Fi mesh networks also have the advantage of being self-ealing, so guarantying a way to get higher robustness of the network, against equipment failure. The young people are closer to the council; they are inclusively coming to the council facilities to ask long term access vouchers. The tourists are asking for vouchers prior to their visits, by email. The network shall be used in the near future to support IP cameras, surveilling a vast area of the city.There is also an intention to promote a municipal IP TV application that shall make use of the Wi-Fi network as a broadcasting medium. |
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