CAFM & IT TUNING IN TO THE NEW Sanjay Khatri, Head of IoT Platform Product Marketing at Cisco IoT,
explains how automated connectivity management helped Radio Data Comms accelerate IoT business growth.
Technology advances and communication capabilities based on the Internet of things (IoT) have enabled the development of connected alarm devices, which can communicate with monitoring stations to help increase responsiveness. Companies such as Radio Data Comms are constantly developing and manufacturing innovative solutions that make buildings safer and the job of the facilities management professional a bit easier.
Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Radio Data Comms and its alarm communication system, Permaconn, are recognised brands in the commercial, retail and residential property sectors. Now with around 180,000 connected devices out in the field, which communicate over 2G, 3G, 4G and IP networks through multiple mobile network operators in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Papua New Guinea, its success is a testament to its ability to create new smart products. Permaconn was one of the first ever machine-to-machine (M2M) back- to-base alarm communications systems over 2G, when it first became available in Australia, and one of the first to achieve redundancy by utilising dual SIMs.
“Automated rules mean that alerts are triggered if any unusual
device activity is detected, which might be caused by unauthorised device access.”
Innovation through IoT connectivity We’ve all been kept awake at night as an alarm goes off in a nearby building or car. It can seem as if no one is ever coming to silence it and check if there is a burglary going on. Often, these alarms are not connected to a network, so the development of a connected alarm system that communicates in real time over a mobile network to a monitoring centre was a welcome innovation. It’s an important product differentiator but it relies on effective network connectivity. What Radio Data Comms needed was a way to know if any of its connections had been lost or if there was any unusual device behaviour.
Connectivity challenges In its early years as a young business pioneering IoT alarm solutions, Radio Data Comms faced some challenges around connectivity management. Today, Radio Data Comms’ Permaconn alarm systems have an audited uptime of 99.9%, but there were times when devices weren’t connected to the network when they should have been.
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“To activate a device on the network, it would take at least 24 hours, with several more hours if any issues surfaced, trying to isolate the cause and rectify with minimal support
available.This certainly wasn’t a great experience, especially when we had a customer physically present in the office waiting to walk away with an installation -ready product.”
The third challenge was the lack of visibility into data usage. This meant the company had no insight into the functioning of its alarms in the field or the accuracy of its invoices from the networks.
Lee continued: “Billing irregularities were a huge issue, taking several days to manually investigate every month. We resorted to writing our own software, enabling us to scan our bills and prove inaccurate invoicing, however, this solution was far from optimal.”
As Radio Data Comms’ business grew to around 20,000 connected devices, the burden of the day-to- day administration for all the devices, including billing reconciliation, started to become a major overhead.
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A faulty connection would mean time- consuming travel to perform an on-site diagnosis because, without a connection, it was impossible to retrieve precise information about what was actually happening at the device level. For Radio Data Comms, regular trips out into the field to collect diagnostic data and provide ongoing device support was costly and an inefficient use of man power.
A second challenge was the activation and deactivation of the connected devices, which involved a call to the operator each time. As Radio Data Comms’ number of connected devices increased, this became untenable. Andrew Lee, General Manager at Radio Data Comms, explained: “For a number of years, our device activation processes required a lot of unnecessary phone calls and emails.
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