Free public WiFi your residents rely on, and the evidence to prove it

WiFi across town centres, libraries and civic buildings that signposts council services, staff access through your council directory and a private key for every device. One platform on the access points you already own, available by direct award on G-Cloud 15.

• OpenRoaming across the city
• UK GDPR consent with a full audit trail
• Microsoft Entra ID sign-in for staff
• Direct award on G-Cloud 15

A typical council today

• Free WiFi in the town centre with no evidence of who uses it or whether it helps
• Residents asked to sign in again at every library, leisure centre and civic building
• Staff on a shared password across the town hall, depots and libraries
• CCTV, building sensors and library kiosks sharing one key that never changes

With Purple

• Visitor numbers, dwell time, repeat visits and resident surveys from every hotspot
• Sign in once, then reconnect automatically across the city with OpenRoaming
• Staff sign in with their council account, and leavers lose access when it is disabled
• Every device gets its own key and VLAN, kept apart from public and staff traffic

Free WiFi that residents join once and keep using

Newcastle City Council runs free public WiFi on 120 access points across city centre streets, the Grainger Market, libraries and museums. Residents sign in once, then OpenRoaming and Passpoint reconnect them at every council hotspot, so the network becomes part of daily life rather than a sign-in screen at each door.

• 650,000 automatic reconnections in Newcastle with no repeat sign-in
• Access to more than 5 million OpenRoaming hotspots worldwide from the same profile
• DNS content filtering with phishing and malware protection and Internet Watch Foundation integration
• Branded sign-in with UK GDPR consent and a full audit trail, on the access points you already own

Newcastle extended the same network to 1,000 local businesses with free WiFi bundles, so residents stay connected in the shops and cafés around council sites.

Hear from residents at the moment they get online

The sign-in page is a channel your communications, digital inclusion and regeneration teams already own. Use it to point people to council services, ask one question that shapes a decision, or invite them to stay in touch. Answers arrive with consent, and opt-ins flow to the platforms you already use.

• Micro-surveys at sign-in: Go Forth Stirling gathered 2,747 responses in six months on why visitors choose a car park
• Halton Council asks leisure centre visitors why they came, to decide where to invest next
• Municipio de Puebla sent 236,700 visits from the WiFi to its municipal website in 2025
• Opt-ins sent to GovDelivery, as East Riding of Yorkshire Council does, or to your CRM through 400+ data connectors

Glasgow Life runs a council-provided micro-survey on its WiFi to gauge how residents and tourists feel about the city, the same question asked across other Glasgow venues.

One login for email, Teams and WiFi, in every council building

Officers move between the town hall, libraries, depots and leisure centres all week. Purple syncs with Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta and JumpCloud over SCIM, so staff connect with the account they already use and group membership decides which network and policy each person gets.

• Leavers are revoked automatically when their account is disabled
• Staff, councillors and contractors land on separate VLANs with their own rules
• Council laptops get EAP-TLS certificates through Intune or Jamf
• Cloud RADIUS with a 99.9% uptime SLA and no on-premise server to patch

Every session is logged against a named person, device, time and location, ready for your next information governance review.

A private key for everything in a council building that cannot sign in

CCTV cameras, door controllers, building sensors, printers, smart displays and meeting room AV cannot use a username and password. xPSK gives each one its own key and its own VLAN, so a leaked key affects one device, not the whole estate.

• Revoke a single key without re-keying every device
• MAC binding ties each key to the first device that uses it
• Time-limited keys for contractors and visiting engineers, with no MDM needed
• Works under your vendor’s name: iPSK on Cisco, DPSK on Ruckus, MPSK on HPE Aruba and Juniper Mist, PPSK on Extreme and UniFi

Public WiFi that pays its way

Newcastle City Council built its smart city programme on four aims: digital inclusion, economic growth, placemaking and civic engagement. Its public WiFi now returns more than four times its annual cost, and residents keep coming back.

Figures from Purple case results: Newcastle City Council and Municipio de Puebla, 2025.

Free brochure

Take this page into your next budget meeting

Everything on this page as an eight-page PDF brochure, ready to share with the people who sign off your network spend.

Pricing

See the price before you book a demo

Compare plans, what each one includes and the add-ons on one page. You do not need a sales call to see the numbers.

See your council on one WiFi platform

Tell us about your town centres, libraries and civic buildings and we will show you how public, staff and device access would work on your hardware.

• Works with Cisco Meraki, HPE Aruba, Ruckus, Juniper Mist, Ubiquiti UniFi, Cambium, Extreme and Fortinet
• Direct award on G-Cloud 15, or through Softcat, Vodafone and MLL
• ISO 27001 certified, Cyber Essentials, UK GDPR compliant, UK RADIUS region