Case Study: Salvador City Hall achieves free, secure Wi‑Fi for thousands with Fortinet

Salvador City Hall Offers Free, Secure Wi-Fi to Thousands of People

Salvador City Hall, through its technology arm COGEL, faced a growing challenge as millions of tourists and residents began using smartphones during large events like Carnival: demand for reliable, secure public Wi‑Fi to support tourism, public safety, journalists and street vendors while protecting users’ data. The city needed a scalable, easy‑to‑manage solution that could handle massive concurrent connections and promote Salvador’s image and local economy.

COGEL launched the “Conecta Salvador” program with Fortinet and partner TeleData, deploying FortiAP access points managed by FortiGate, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer and FortiAuthenticator to provide secure, centrally managed Wi‑Fi. The network expanded yearly—peaking at over 6,000 simultaneous connections in 2019 and serving more than 80,000 users via 100 access points in 2020—boosting tourism, enabling vendors’ digital commerce, and delivering a scalable, secure platform the city plans to extend to more public areas.

Salvador City Hall

Cláudio Maltez

Technical Director