Are you looking for a better way to connect distributed locations?
About 6 years ago, we were struggling with a consistent way for communications to stores in a cost effective manner across our locations in 4 countries.
We were working with 6 telcommunication providers for store data connections in 4 countries providing their their own connectivity methods. At the time, Canada was a very fragmented market without an aggregator.
The best solution back then was a private IP network with each provider and try and merge the routing.
For us, this wasn't sustainable and it had a number of problems. The main issues were:
1) The providers controlled the routers in store which limited our control and connection monitoring.
2) The solutions were all very expensive.
3) There was no backup solution and you were limited to a single data provider.
4) It did not provide split tunnelling at the store locations (internet/corporate). This meant that all transactions had to go back via a corporate aggregated location.
5) There were no white or black lists of IP addresses which meant your filtering must occur at that centralised location.
6) Integrated EFTPOS was a problem as the gateway had to be at the corporate office.
7) Speed limited. Most global private IP solutions at that time had very limited speed 512/512 was about the best even though ADSL 2+ had been public for quite some time.
8) It was challenging to implement wifi technology in the store which would route inside and outside the network.
We went to meeting after meeting with telecommunications providers with the consistent result of 'its not possible' or 'its too expensive' to fix.
So we partnered with Juniper (a network hardware provider) and built our own network. It took 2 years to design, configure, build, test and then implement globally on our 300 stores and it works very very well for far less than $2000 capital cost per store.
The Juniper router takes any network connection and a fail over 3/4G modem (from a different telecommunications provider for redundancy), plugs in a high grade wifi access point all for much less than $45 per month with no data limit and removes all the problems above and provides a robust wifi service in store.
It is also compatible in every country we operate in. One configuration managed centrally.
The result?
Integrated EFTPOS is now available with a gateway in each store.
Faster internet for store operations for direct secured internet access.
Faster corporate applications (One data transmission process went from 30 minutes on average to 6 minutes on average).
Firewalled white and black lists for internet access.
Separated internal and external wifi.
Redundancy. We can now unplug our primary data connection and failover is set to 15 seconds. This enables refits and temporary locations to only require a power connection and no data connections. We can have up to 3 mobile data sticks from different providers merging the 3G/4G streams for throughput if required. We haven't found a good use case for this, so we just stick with the one backup stick from the different data provider. 3/4G is fast enough to keep our stores operating during primary link failure or temporary kiosk situation.
Have a great day!
Ross.
Have a great day!
Ross.
