How Fabric to the Edge is Powering Sustainable Public Transportation for Sporveien AS

Sporveien AS, the most prominent public transportation provider in Norway, has been operating the bus, tram, and subway traffic in Oslo for nearly 150 years. To move forward into a more sustainable and cost-effective future, the company needed to make its large underlying network infrastructure more flexible, cost-efficient, resilient, and secure.

Sporveien was challenged by the limitations of its inflexible legacy solution, which no longer met its needs. Deploying new services on its IP fabric network required manually configuring as many as 100 network switches every time, putting on both the IT budget and resources and increasing the risk of human error or cybersecurity breaches. Additionally, long network downtimes caused traffic delays, costing the company hefty fines.

To create a simpler and more agile network without sacrificing security, Sporveien chose to base the new solution on Extreme Fabric—from the network core to the access switches and wireless access points.

Challenges

• Better resilience and redundancy of critical network infrastructure to reduce downtime.
• A logical segmentation of the network for administration, management, and technical tasks.
• Ability to connect existing, traditional networks to the fabric or extend the fabric to third-party locations instantly via any type of connection and topology.
• A demanding physical cabling infrastructure with independent services (I-SIDs) on top.

Extreme Solutions

• Universal Wired Access
• Extreme Fabric Connect
• ExtremeCloud IQ - Site Engine

Results

• Much faster and easier onboarding of new equipment, applications, services, and users, translating into direct operational savings.
• Risk of network downtime is significantly reduced across the entire infrastructure, which helps protect the company’s reputation.
• No VLANs or IP addresses that potential attackers could exploit and centralized, in-depth control over all endpoints across the entire network.