Small cells in the enterprise: private GSM comes to City Hall

Small cells in the enterprise: private GSM comes to City Hall

When the municipality of Zaanstad in the Netherlands brought together services previously housed in three locations in its stunning new City Hall, it decided it also needed a new, more effective, more effi cient approach to working within the building.

Private GSM at-a-glance

• Private GSM solution for the municipality of  Zaanstad in the Netherlands.

• Internal enterprise network including PBX integration, edge-based mobile network 

software and 41 GSM small cells serving up to 1500 employees.

• Connects to PSTN and enterprise voice and data network. Roams onto macro.

• Launch: November 2011. 

• Technology provided by Dimension Data, Quortus, ip.access and Private Mobility.

This radical reappraisal meant that the majority of municipality offi cials would have no fi xed workplace; staff, when entering the building, would find themselves a place to work. And only members of the customer contact centre and the secretarial staff would have a landline. The rest of the staff would be given a choice of smartphones.But these smartphones were not going to get most of their use on macro networks. The City Hall was to have a new telephony infrastructure bringing small cells to an unusual enterprise application – a private mobile network that would allow the 1500 or so City Hall staff to work and be contactable at any one of 1050 workstations or anywhere else in the building.Specialist IT services and solutions provider Dimension Data was the system integrator for the project – the designing and building of a private GSM network fully integrated with an IP telephony-based communications platform, bringing Unified Communication functionality to employee smartphones. When employees are working outside the building, they are also reachable and may simply roam between the private GSM network and the public network.