What sets fast-food enterprises apart from other eateries is its defining feature: fast. Designed to prioritize the speed of service, it’s no secret that operations within each branch need the resources to help them achieve quick speeds. To do so, a well-known fast-food chain installed self-ordering kiosks in 450 sites within one of their countries in operations. However, they needed a connectivity setup to keep these kiosks up and running.
Fast-Food Comes to a Slow Stop
The fast-food chain runs 450 sites across the region, with each relying solely on an MPLS line for connectivity. This connection is mainly used for their POS systems and their back offices. Eventually, this was also used by the ordering kiosks set up in each branch. In the event of this link going dead, a DSL line is on standby.
It didn’t take long, however, for this fast-food chain to encounter issues. Despite having the failover feature available, when active, orders being placed through kiosks were errored out and thus, not placed. This meant that the failover solution was not as seamless as what the fast-food chain needed.
They needed a solution to cater to the branches’ real-time applications and to actively connect back to the data center. And since there are hundreds of branches, it was highly preferred that a central management platform be used to manage the setup remotely.
Additionally, each branch provided free public Wi-Fi service for their customers. The fast-food chain wanted a more secure link that can offload public internet traffic to commodity links. At the same time, they also wanted a connectivity setup that would allow for greater bandwidth.
The Ultimate Combo
After looking through their options, the fast-food chain reached out to one of Peplink’s partners. Their reason: our unmatched technologies dedicated to making connectivity reliable, and all at an affordable price point.
With the help of our partner, each branch was able to set up a Balance One Core along with SpeedFusion Bonding licenses. Simultaneously, two Balance 1350s were installed in high availability mode in the main office.
Using Bandwidth Bonding, multiple connections being used were combined for greater bandwidth capacity. And thanks to Hot Failover, the seamless transition from one link to another created a resilient network, preventing any more orders from getting lost.
Order’s Up
Not long after this new setup was put into place, the fast-food chain experienced its benefits. Each branch experienced an increase in productivity thanks to the active use of the ordering kiosks. Despite the size of the deployment, the fast-food chain is able to manage the whole network through InControl.
Furthermore, this solution only came with nominal warranty for the maintenance of the management system. No annual costs were required, earning them a win through saved costs. With this new setup, the fast-food chain is able to maintain their quick operations without drops in their connectivity or service quality.
Deployment
Balance One Core
- Deployed to each fast-food branch site
- Active failover to avoid any lost orders when connection drops
- Combines bandwidths for faster connection speeds
Balance 1350
- Installed at the head office in high availability mode
- Supported by InControl for monitoring devices across all sites
- Capable of speeds up to 13 WAN connections combined
