Case Study: City of Opelika achieves expanded public Wi‑Fi coverage and simplified network management with Cisco Meraki

City of Opelika - Customer Case Study

The City of Opelika, led by CTO Stephen Dawe, needed reliable, scalable network access to advance its smart-city goals and meet citizen demand for public Wi‑Fi at high-traffic venues like the Sportsplex. To solve this, the City of Opelika turned to Cisco Meraki, deploying Meraki access points and MS switches (with Cisco Catalyst supporting the underlying infrastructure) to provide easy provisioning, monitoring, and management across city facilities.

Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed Wi‑Fi and switches were rolled out across parks, the Sportsplex, fire stations and city buildings, and integrated with Cisco’s LoRaWAN IoT support for sensors. The deployment delivers consistent performance for 700–900 concurrent users on soccer nights and supported roughly 5,000 people at the State Swim Championships, while the Meraki dashboard enabled remote troubleshooting, stronger access controls, and bandwidth/app limits. The solution freed the seven‑person IT team to focus on smart-city projects, with 30 sensors already deployed (capacity for 1,000+), and street-light controls expected to cut electricity costs by about 50%.

City of Opelika

Stephen Dawe

Chief Technology Officer