Smart city application on a Siklu network – Vail, Colorado

Vail is an alpine village in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. With more than 5,200 acres of terrain, it is one of the largest ski resorts in the world. The area hosts concerts and music festivals for large audiences year-round with almost two million visitors from all over the world.

Details such as security, capacity-rich Wi-Fi and also environmental aesthetics are of utmost importance to residents and visitors alike. With social events taking place simultaneously in multiple locations, maintaining connectivity as well as communication between first responders, volunteers, and town officials is complicated but essential to ensure the safety of the public.

The reach of the municipal fiber network needed to be extended, as in many locations terrain challenges made fiber laying a physical impossibility. The town also suffers fiber cut-offs from time to time. These issues had been impeding the essential 24/7 operation of the video surveillance network, greatly hindering the communication flow and compromising site monitoring. In addition, these problems consume heavy OPEX, and take a long time to resolve. Aspen Wireless, a local ISP realized that due to difficulties in expanding the fiber infrastructure, mmWave wireless was a perfect candidate to extend the existing fiber footprint.