SUNNYVALE, Calif. - November 1, 2011 - Aruba Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: ARUN) today announced that the City of Brescia, located in the second largest province in Italy, is providing extensive Wi-Fi coverage with the Aruba AirMesh outdoor portfolio of products. The AirMesh network enables Internet hot-spot connectivity, video surveillance on public transportation, Intranet access for city employees and visitor volume tracking. The network was designed and deployed by Lais Brescia, an Aruba Gold Partner.
"We needed a proven multiservice mesh solution with minimal infrastructure and cabling needs, high performance for video over multiple hops and low visual impact," said Massimo Bianchini, City of Brescia Supervisor of Technological Innovation. "Since we already use Aruba at our university, having a single vendor for multiple projects greatly simplifies deployment and management for us."
The municipality's key criteria for the solution selection were product reliability, high bandwidth availability and manageability and a strong focus on aesthetic design. The city of 197,000 people is host to a wide variety of historically and architecturally significant buildings and monuments and the new system needed to be powerful and flexible, with sufficient capacity and reach to be deployed pervasively without drawing attention. The municipality chose Aruba AirMesh 802.11n MSR-2000 mesh routers for ubiquitous Wi-Fi access throughout the historical center of Brescia. The low-profile AirMesh routers were installed on existing municipality infrastructure (traffic lights, LED panels and parking lots) to create a wireless mesh infrastructure, alleviating the need to run cabling to each device.
The Aruba AirMesh portfolio of products features an intelligent multi-radio design, with dual- and quad-radio 802.11n MIMO platforms, enabling massive capacity, interference mitigation and sustained throughput over multiple network hops. Aruba MeshOSTM, with Adaptive Wireless RoutingTM (AWRTM), provides RF-aware, Layer-3 network intelligence to optimize traffic flow, reduce latency and ensure resiliency. Active Video TransportTM (AVTTM) optimizes and prioritizes video traffic, significantly improving video quality by reducing packet loss and jitter. AVT can identify video frames at 30 fps, a critical capability in delivery of HD-quality video over multiple hops. Aruba's MobileMatrixTM technology enables reliable roaming between mesh routers in less than 50 milliseconds.
"Innovative cities like Brescia are realizing the potential of Wi-Fi, not only for hotspots and video surveillance, but toward enhancing their residents' and visitors' quality of experience," said Greg Murphy, vice president and general manager of outdoor mesh networking for Aruba. "This deployment will enhance communications, improve security and make Brescia an even more attractive place to live and visit than it always has been."
