COMS Systems, an IT services and consulting company, has been operating front-of-house gaming systems in over 900 clubs and pubs in New Zealand and Australia for around a decade. Their technologies include a facial recognition system that is used to identify problem gamblers listed under CONCERN, a national centralized database of excluded individuals.
Challenge
At each pub or club, the number of individuals varied and so did the network infrastructure. The facial recognition system provided by COMS relied on in-house broadband. This led to reliability issues because an on-site technician was required to manually reset the network each time the venue systems failed.
On top of this, there was a global chip shortage. This affected how the facial recognition systems would directly send processed images from cameras to the cloud. They needed a new reliable system to facilitate the facial recognition technologies hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Solution
COMS Systems reached out to their IoT and Peplink partner, M2M One, for a possible solution. They recommended deploying the Balance 20X to bring their facial recognition systems online. To test this, Balance 20Xs were installed with the venue broadband and 4G IoT SIMs in a few of the venues. For three months, they monitored this setup and continued to dive deeper into Peplink tools such as InControl 2 and InTouch.
Result
After assessing the solution, the Balance 20X now successfully powers the facial recognition system in twenty-four locations in New Zealand. With the Balance 20X, the built-in failover feature ensures reliable failover to cellular in the event the venue broadband drops. Additionally, the end-to-end VPN encryption keeps data protected.
Thanks to InControl 2 and InTouch, the Balance 20Xs can be configured and managed remotely, eliminating significant costs for on-site technicians. Now, they plan to continue deploying this setup to other New Zealand sites, followed by their expansion to Australia locations.
Deployment
- Deployed to different pubs and clubs to power facial recognition systems
- Provides failover to cellular in case the venue broadband drops
- Affordable and manageable remotely resulting in reduced maintenance fees
