Kota Kinabalu, Transforming to an Engaged and Connected City
Introduction
Kota Kinabalu citizens are up for a good news in November as it will be having free Internet service. This has been confirmed after the RM5 million approval to fund the free Wi-Fi project. The Communications and Multimedia Ministry (MCMC) has approved the project and has granted a 1 gigabyte (GB) of bandwidth. Speed available to Kota Kinabalu citizen will be not less than 10MBps in speed.
Once a phone number is registered, the user is able to surf the internet on any electronic devices that provide the capability of Wi-Fi usage. For ease of use, tourist engagement can be promoted via social media login if they do not have local phone number. Kota Kinabalu City Wi-Fi is intended for use in the outdoor public area of Bandaraya Kota Kinabalu only. The coverage of each Kota Kinabalu City Wi-Fi access point has an estimated range of up to 30 meters. Challenge
The Chief Minister of Sabah recognised that city centre visitors now expect Wi-Fi as standard and that a lot of metropolises around the world are starting to offer free connectivity. People want to be able to browse the web, access social media and engage with online content whenever and wherever they may be.
Therefore, to meet the demands of their consumers the council sought a free, secure, connectivity solution that shoppers, visitors, residents and local business owners could access. The city of Kota Kinabalu therefore needed a Wi-Fi solution as a base for implementing innovative smart city projects, including a Wi-Fi portal where local retailers could present their products.
For all these projects, the city needs a Wi-Fi system with a stable and comprehensive coverage. In order to ensure this, sound expertise in implementation as well as carrier-grade equipment is required. Solution
To meet this challenge, the city of Kota Kinabalu was looking for a suitable provider of Wi-Fi solutions. On another note, we are really excited to introduce Kiwire to manage user network access in this environment. Kiwire comes with a powerful management tool which can monitor users in their network remotely, no software controllers required. Thus, users can get up to 10GB data per hour.
Kiwire has a powerful and flexible integration module that lets you authenticate user identity via Microsoft Active Directory, Federate Radius, Property Management system, Social login (Facebook, Google+, Wechat & etc) and the API for your own in-house applications. With fast and reliable connectivity across the city, local residents and tourists are now able to stay connected with different applications and tourist information. Result
As this smart city case studies demonstrates, our Kiwire solutions enable entities like the city of Kota Kinabalu to transform data from connected machines into insight that can help make communities more efficient, productive, sustainable, and secure.
Management are also able to receive more precise directions, and various departments can work together more efficiently to address the needs of their neighboring jurisdictions helping control costs, improve response times, and protect the well-being of the larger community.