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.
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 M2M 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 Data 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.
The simple yet extremely effective solution was to develop and introduce a managed M2M communications service that offers the same benefits as a pay-as-you-go solution but is less problematic.