A global fast-food restaurant enterprise has around 450 sites within one of their operating regions. Having installed new self-ordering kiosks, this enterprise was looking for a connectivity solution to support their day-to-day operations.
Challenge
This enterprise’s current connectivity network for each of the 450 sites relies on a single WAN link with an MPLS connection. Additionally, a DSL connection is used as standby failover. This connection is mainly used to operate their man-powered POS.
However, they discovered that when the failover feature goes active, it errors out existing orders being made, resulting in down-time within the site. Although automatic, they needed a failover solution that was more seamless.
One service this enterprise also provided was free public Wi-Fi to their customers. Thus, they needed a connectivity solution that would allow them to offload public internet traffic to commodity links without compromising network security. Simultaneously, bandwidth growth was also required.
For the newly deployed kiosks, the restaurant enterprise was looking for a setup that would provide a real-time and active connection back to the data center to maintain functionality. And to top it all off, they sought a central management platform to manage the connectivity networks of all sites remotely.
Solution
The enterprise looked into different solution providers, placing Peplink amongst many others in a comparison chart. After narrowing down their options to two brands, they reached out to Peplink for its unique technologies and advantageous price point.
With Peplink’s help, the enterprise deployed 450 Balance One Cores with SpeedFusion Bonding licenses, one at each restaurant; while 2 Balance 1350s operating in high availability mode were installed in the head office. These were all added to the existing network.
SpeedFusion’s Bandwidth Bonding aggregates multiple links present to increase the bandwidth capacity at each restaurant. Additionally, Hot Failover allows for session persistence, preventing any lost orders if the connection dropped.
Result
Thanks to Peplink’s connectivity devices, the enterprise was able to enjoy no lost transactions, while maximizing the services of their self-ordering kiosks and man-powered POS. On top of these, Peplink’s cloud-based endpoint management system, InControl, monitored and managed each restaurant’s network.
Despite the large deployment, the enterprise secured a win with saved costs. This Peplink solution only came with nominal warranty to maintain the management system, but there were no annual costs, unlike competing brands.
Now, both the fast-food enterprise and their customer have access to fast connectivity, and can drop any worries about dropped connections.
Deployment
- Deployed to each restaurant site
- Active failover to avoid any lost orders when connections drop
- Combines bandwidths for faster connection speeds
- Installed in high availability mode
- Supported by InControl for monitoring devices across all sites
- Capable of speeds up to 13 WAN connections combined