Indian city automates tax collection

By EgovAsia Editors | Aug 24, 2010

Vidarbha Infotech Pvt.Ltd. (VIPL), a telecom and IT solutions provider, has selected Proxim's point-to-multipoint (PtMP) solutions to provide a city-wide wireless network to enable automated tax collection and eGovernment initiatives in the city of Nagpur, India. VIPL utilized Proxim's Tsunami MP.11 5054 radios and ProximVision ES central management system to connect over 34 locations throughout central India's largest city.

VIPL was contracted by the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) to connect 18 octroi (local tax) collection stations - one at each of the entry points to the city of Nagpur - as well as 10 zonal offices and six other locations, including data centers. After initially deploying equipment from Motorola, followed by evaluation of other brands like Ubiquiti and Wavion, VIPL and NMC decided to replace the existing network with Proxim's solutions for greater performance and support.

"In addition to the scope of the network and number of locations that needed to be connected, the other challenge was that we needed to run two distinct applications - tax collection and eGovernment portals - separately on the same network," said Prashant Ugemuge, Managing Director of VIPL, Nagpur. "Proxim's solutions provided exceptional performance, as well as the ability to easily configure VLANs for the different applications."

Since the Proxim wireless network was needed to provide critical backbone connectivity for NMC's online octroi tax collection system, the primary requirement was to ensure the entire network would stay up and running even in the case of a base station failure. The secondary requirement was to facilitate NMC's eGovernment portals in the same network, and to have both applications running on separate VLANs.

"Proxim Wireless not only provided a superior solution, but also provided network design support and helped set up the entire network with VLAN capabilities and redundancy," said Ugemuge. "With the ProximVision ES management system, we are able to monitor and manage the performance of the entire network from a single location. Everything is up and running, and we expect the ROI for this deployment to be less than two years."