Borough of Brent
This city WiFi solution took place in the London Borough of Brent. The installation was planned and completed by one of our partners, Unified Consultancy, using Xirrus equipment.
Key Results
Increase
in Brent Council Facebook page likes
Increase
in Brent Libraries Facebook page likes
Solutions
successfully rolled out in 14 venues
Objectives
- The IT team wanted a solution which was secure, easy to use and manage, reliable and that met the relevant data retention and protection regulations.
- The communications and library teams were primarily interested in the end user experience, more detailed visitor reporting, whether the data could be exported to their existing mailing software and how the system could increase their social media exposure. Unified Consultancy and Purple were able to meet all of these requirements and more.
- A solution in line with the government’s digital inclusion initiative, which aims to equip the whole country with skills, motivation and trust to go online.
- Content filtering was also required to ensure visitors cannot access inappropriate websites. With state of the art content filtering, Purple gives Brent the ability to choose which categories of sites to allow and which to block.
Installation
London Borough of Brent already had an existing guest solution and wanted to run the two systems concurrently to compare performance and to ensure Purple met all of their needs. The primary challenge was ensuring Purple was effectively marketed to the public to ensure a sufficient level of data was collated to allow comparison of both systems. Unified Consultancy distributed instruction leaflets to visitors in the Civic Centre to raise awareness of the new system and also ran a staff education initiative to ensure they were aware of the new system and the value it adds.
Another challenge involved ensuring the IT lending library devices were all pre-registered, ready for immediate use without registration. This challenge was resolved by the Purple WiFi helpdesk, who manually pre-registered the devices in bulk, using their MAC address.
About Borough of Brent
The London Borough of Brent is a London borough in north-west London. It borders the boroughs of Harrow to the north-west, Barnet to the north-east, Camden to the east, the City of Westminster to the south-east, as well as the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham and Ealing to the south.
Industry
Company size
The London Borough of Brent covers 43.25 km² and has a population of over 330,000
Location
Borough of Brent, North West London
Products Implemented