Cellubi in Action
Door Entry Systems for Housing Associations and Local Authorities
The challenge of maintaining door entry systems
Housing associations and local authorities across the UK service thousands of blocks of flats. It’s a significant responsibility that involves the care and maintenance of the entire fabric of the building, from gutters and drainage to lighting and landscaping.
An important part of these buildings that largely goes unnoticed (until it stops working) is the Door Entry System. A functioning door entry system is crucial to the security of a multi-tenant building. If it stops working, the problems can be serious. Tenants can be locked out of their homes and trespassers can be allowed in, so it’s no surprise that housing associations pay close attention to door entry maintenance. Modern door entry systems also log important data that housing associations require. In addition to monitoring the overall health of the system, information on the numbers of users and frequency of opening needs to be retrieved as part of the maintenance schedule. For larger associations and authorities this could mean the headache of making regular visits to thousands of door entry systems.
This is a very labour-intensive and costly process.
The first generation cellular M2M solution
Unsurprisingly, housing associations and local authorities realised the benefits of cellular M2M services some time ago. To avoid the cost of regular support visits, door entry panels were fitted with pay-as-you-go SIM cards. It was a simple solution that enabled maintenance crews to simply dial in to the system to retrieve data and perform a health check. This pay-as-you-go solution seemed to work well for a while, but problems soon began to occur.
The first major issue was the significant upfront investment needed to buy thousands of SIM cards. The pay-as-you-go model required housing associations to invest in advance, buying tens of thousands of pounds worth of network credit before fitting these fully charged SIM cards into door entry panels. This in turn led to the problem of vandalism and theft. It wasn’t long before word spread that door entry panels were equipped with fully charged SIM cards. Criminals began breaking open door panels causing thousands of pounds worth of damage to gain access to the SIM card and its valuable credit.
Other administrative problems soon began to surface. Due to their very low usage rates, sometimes dialling out only a few times in a year, these pay-as-you-go SIM cards began to fall off the network. It soon became clear that simple pay-as-you-go SIMs were not designed for the task. SIMs could be disconnected from the network due to inactivity; credit could be lost; and the standard pay-as-you-go call centre support was not equipped to deal with the demands of the M2M customer. Moreover with the increased vandalism and theft and the need to manually re-charge thousands of SIM cards, maintenance site visits were still required.
Cellubi – a simple managed service for M2M communications
Cellubi from Wireless Innovation is the service of choice for housing associations and local authorities across the UK. It’s a simple, managed M2M cellular service that provides all the benefits of a pay-as-you-go solution with none of the headaches. As a low cost on-contract service, Cellubi requires no upfront investment and removes the need for manual re-charging. Instead of regular site visits to add credit, housing associations can now simply pay a small monthly fee, safe in the knowledge that their costs are under control.
As Cellubi was designed specifically for the M2M market there is no risk of a SIM being disconnected from lack of use. Cellubi offers a range of bespoke packages to ensure that customers pay only for the data they require, providing them with guaranteed network access for the life of the system regardless of how much or how little data is sent. Security and theft issues are similarly mitigated with a managed M2M service. Cellubi SIMs can simply be locked down to ensure that they cannot be used for outgoing calls or for data downloads.
Cellubi is backed and supported by the M2M experience of the Wireless Innovation team. Instead of relying on a pay-as-you-go call centre, Cellubi customers can call on a dedicated M2M support team who understand the requirements of the system and are able to deliver practical assistance based on years of experience in the door entry market.
