ECKey, one of the market leaders in Smartphone Access Control Systems and Bluetooth Readers, announced that Chester County, PA, has chosen ECKey access control technology to install at their cell tower sites to provide more effective protection for such critical infrastructure. The Protection Bureau, in Exton PA, is overseeing the planning and installation for this on-going project.
ECKey, one of the market leaders in Smartphone Access Control Systems and Bluetooth Readers, announced that Chester County, PA, has chosen ECKey access control technology to install at their cell tower sites to provide more effective protection for such critical infrastructure. The Protection Bureau, in Exton PA, is overseeing the planning and installation for this on-going project.
In the United States there are over 100,000 cellphone tower sites that house expensive telecommunications and other radio technologies. Chester County has 32 cell tower sites and until recently relied on padlocks or keypads, which offered no activity log and were easily compromised.
The county was experiencing copper theft, vandalism, and graffiti. They also had no way to grant access to technicians arriving at sites unannounced and no audit trail of who was coming and going. With a limited budget, network connections were out of the question.
Karen Baker from The Protection Bureau, an ECKey Certified Partner, presented ECKey's cloud-based VIZpin service to the county. They were impressed with the technology and The Protection Bureau's know-how and decided to install the solution at approximately 20 of the county's 32 cell tower site—saving more than $80,000 with no loss of functionality or control compared to older panel/server based access control solutions.
Chester County utilized Homeland Security federal grant money for this project and the equipment installed is on the federal authorized equipment list, making such a solution highly appropriate for any other government agency that uses federal funding. The solution is scalable so the county can roll-out additional sites when they have the budget.
ECKey's VIZpin service provides sophisticated electronic access control at a fraction of the cost of traditional access solutions that require panels, wiring and network connections. County officials can now use their cell phones to gain and grant access to any of the sites; there are no keys, fobs, or PIN numbers to remember or share. Installation and maintenance costs are a fraction of competing systems and site-data is available in the cloud anytime, from anywhere which means no more driving to each site to administrate the system or access activity information.
Before ECKey's VIZpin solution, administrating a system remotely without a network connection was not possible. With VIZpin, data travels between the site and the cloud via the VIZpin app. No network connection is required and that critical data is available anytime, anywhere.