Housing Development Corporation of Maldives Taps Calix to Create Gigabit Smart City

Calix, Inc. has partnered with Housing Development Corporation Limited (HDC) in a multi-year deal in the Maldives to rapidly bring its vision of an all-fiber, state-of-the-art smart city on the island of Hulhumalé to fruition.

Hulhumalé is an ambitious land reclamation and urban development project with a world-class open access network at the heart of its transformation. The vision is to deliver an unrivaled broadband experience and cutting-edge smart city applications.

Powered by the AXOS E7-2 Intelligent Modular System, GigaFamily products, and Calix Services, this end-to-end solution will ultimately support a target population of 240,000. These residents require a complex set of deployment scenarios, including residential, business, and mixed-use multi-dwelling unit (MDU) buildings, hospitality properties, and single-family homes.

As the master developer of Hulhumalé, HDC will rely on the extensive experience of both the Calix Professional Services team to deploy island-wide GPON infrastructure and the Calix Managed Services team to provide real-time Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) services for the all-important connectivity component of this initiative.

“As we embark on this ambitious buildout of Hulhumalé as the first smart and sustainable city in the Maldives, Calix will be an important partner by providing the gigabit connectivity and network management services that will enable many of our core capabilities,” said Ahmed Nasif, Managing Director of HDC. “With applications running around the clock, like smart traffic management, smart lighting, and automatic safety surveillance, our network must be highly reliable in all weather conditions. Calix Managed Services will provide real-time monitoring and proactive management of our network, which will minimize downtime of these mission-critical applications and ensure that the advanced broadband services provided on our open access network are always available to subscribers.”

Just off the Eastern coast of the capital city of Malé, Hulhumalé is an intelligently planned reclaimed island which has a current population of 50,000. Focused on creating a better community for its residents, HDC is committed to making Hulhumalé fully sustainable with green transportation, energy, and housing principles at its foundation. As HDC plans to grow the island infrastructure to support two-thirds of the country’s population, network connectivity plays a crucial role in delivering essential residential services, as well as supporting burgeoning economic development opportunities.

Looking to compete with similar initiatives across South Asia, the Calix GPON-powered smart network allows Hulhumalé to attract new businesses, residents, and tourism to its rapidly developing area.

“The consultative relationship between Calix and HDC has allowed us to partner with them as they have accelerated the expansion of their impressive Hulhumalé smart city initiative,” said Greg Billings, senior vice president of services at Calix. “The Calix Services team is excited to redefine the ways we can help both traditional communications service providers and unique customers like HDC achieve goals that transcend technology implementation. By providing Professional Services, Support and Managed Services, and Education and Certification paths, we can make a dramatic impact on the entire network deployment and ongoing operational lifecycle. We are thrilled to continue our relationship with HDC as their network grows.”

Part of the newly expanded Calix Services portfolio, the Calix Managed Services RMM offering provides HDC with 7x24x365 fast identification and automated triage of network-affecting issues through a cloud-based platform that minimizes any impact on the subscriber experience. Machine learning and automated pattern matching techniques help rapidly identify the possible root cause of the problem and incidents are routed to Calix engineers within seconds of an alarm. Calix engineers will quickly work with HDC to help them resolve the issue before subscribers call in. The rapid response, analytics-driven triage, and deep domain knowledge of the Calix Managed Services team will help HDC to be proactive as they solve subscriber related incidents on their network.