Case Study: City of San Jose achieves wickedly fast, high‑capacity public Wi‑Fi and lower CAPEX/OPEX with RUCKUS Networks

Creating a Smarter City in San Jose With Wickedly Fast Wi-Fi

The City of San Jose — a technology hub and California’s third largest city — needed to replace an early municipal 802.11b/g Wi‑Fi network that could not keep up with more devices, multimedia streaming and next‑generation city services. The city sought a highly scalable, unified indoor/outdoor solution that increased capacity and coverage downtown and at high‑density venues like the airport and convention center, while avoiding costly fiber trenching and simplifying management.

San Jose deployed Ruckus ZoneFlex (7762 outdoor, 7731 P‑T‑P bridges, 7982 indoor), redundant ZoneDirector controllers and FlexMaster management with Smart Mesh networking and PoE power adapters on poles and facades. The rollout expanded coverage across 1.5 sq. miles and indoors, delivered 4–6 Mbps per client (with up to 3–4x performance over the legacy network and over a terabyte of daily throughput), reduced CAPEX/OPEX by requiring fewer APs and less trenching, and enabled reliable services like streaming video and Wi‑Fi‑enabled parking meters.

City of San Jose

Vijay Sammeta

CIO