Case Study: City of Rancho Cordova expands free public WiFi and secures city networks with Cisco Meraki

Expanding access to free wifi in public spaces for 65,000 residents

The City of Rancho Cordova, home to about 65,000 residents, faced an aging, failure-prone network with high ongoing refresh costs and a complex interface. After testing, the city selected Cisco Meraki’s full‑stack solution—including Mobility Device Management, Security & SD‑WAN, Switching and Wireless LAN (Branch Networking features like Auto VPN, Layer 7 traffic shaping, VLAN tagging, and Active Directory integration)—to simplify management and secure public and staff networks.

Cisco Meraki deployed cloud‑managed APs, Meraki MS switches, security appliances and Systems Manager MDM, creating segmented SSIDs (public with per‑client limits and a hidden AD‑authenticated staff SSID) and a site‑to‑site VPN that brings Code Enforcement and Animal Services vehicles onto the LAN with failover for wireless point‑to‑point. As a result, all core switches are now Meraki MS devices, WiFi is being expanded citywide, remote management and alerts reduced operational overhead, and the city is testing Meraki Z1 telecommuter units and the Meraki app to further enable flexible, reliable administration.

City of Rancho Cordova

Jay Hadley

IT Manager