Overview
Partnering with Cambium Networks, Nomosphère provides more than 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across France and abroad. Assuming the role of a Managed Services Provider, Nomosphère ensures the operation and supervision of its deployed networks by promoting automated interventions and proactivity in order to ensure the sustained operating conditions of the communications infrastructures of its sites.
THE CITY OF PARIS SOCIAL ACTION CENTER (CASVP) is dedicated to fighting against all forms of exclusion, minimizing inequalities, and guaranteeing and facilitating access to rights. It assists and supports the most vulnerable individuals daily. Its extensive area of competence covers senior assistance, handicap assistance, family services, and assistance to individuals living in economically vulnerable circumstances. The CASVP has about 5,000 employees, a large number of which are social workers.
Challenge
THE GOAL OF THE CASVP is to establish a professional Wi-Fi infrastructure that is operated, managed, and maintained 7 days per week from 08:30 to 18:00 for its 294 sites, with a 24/24 and 7/7 extension for establishments that wish to benefit from this service (RS, CHRS, EHPAD). This Wi-Fi service is intended for employees (administrators, social workers, caregivers) as well as users.
Access to the Wi-Fi service must be secure and simple. The population benefiting from the CASVP is very cosmopolitan, especially in the shelters. Therefore, the service connection interface must be capable of managing and easily adding several
languages. It must also inform individuals of the different services they can access. “If the expressed technical need is relatively standard, deploying a Wi-Fi infrastructure across almost 300 sites requires a very specific organization and logistics,” says Matthieu Costes, Nomosphère project lead. “This begins with the coverage studies, which have been difficult for us to model due to the diversity of localities and their more or less outdated design. Access to certain establishments is at times highly regulated. You have to find the right people to organize visits well in advance. Coordinating interventions has been one of the greatest challenges for our project team.” In the end, the security charter established by the IT service of the city of Paris led CASVP to develop a tunneling system for data flowing out of Wi-Fi access points in order to isolate them from the established infrastructure.
Solution
CASVP’S WI-FI INFRASTRUCTURE is based on the deployment of about 3,000 Cambium Networks indoor e410 access points. “We chose this solution because, having already used it on many other projects, we know it well. It is reliable and offers a quality-performanceprice ratio that puts us in a favorable position to win the tender,” says Jean-Yves Simon, Nomosphère director of sales. “Setting up the equipment and managing infrastructures is very simple, thanks to the cnMaestro cloud management platform. Furthermore, the e410 access points are perfectly integrated with our Network Operations Center. This allows us to ensure the level of supervision expected by the CASVP. From our data center in France, we can monitor all components and intervene without delay if an incident arises. Once processed, we can reproduce the corrective measure throughout the entire infrastructure, if necessary, for preventive purposes.”
Finally, Nomosphère designed and customized a captive portal dedicated to the CASVP. This portal manages authentication and differentiated access to resources. “This undertaking has been very satisfying. We usually manage French and English on our portal. In this particular case, to respond to all users, we had to integrate some fifteen languages, such as Pashtun, for example…” concludes Agathe Pessel, communications manager.
Results
400 ACCESS POINTS have already been deployed across nearly 100 sites and are controlled by our Network Operations Center. These first installations have allowed us to refine our organization and our procedures and will ease the installation of the next 2,600 APs across the more than 200 remaining sites.