Batboard

I'm looking for a telecom shelter electronic access system for about 1000 sites. Most popular in the industry seem to be the GE Security TRACess / SUPRA system. Comments on this system or any other solution are most welcome.

With IP connectivity being more and more universal, I'm wondering if a real time access control system for remote telecom shelters has become affordable as well as mature for this application. There seem to be plenty of access systems designed for large buildings with hundreds of doors, but not many for the telecom "one door per building x 1000" approach.

You can see that I'm struggling with choosing the popular TRACess, non-real time (for audit purposes) technology over something newer with real time responsiveness. The advantage of a real time system is that terminated employees and contractors immediately loose their access. Secondly, if someone doesn't have a keypad with them for whatever legitamite reason, the door can be opened remotely. Also for discussion in this vein is card vs. keypad or other means of authenticating the user.

Comments with reference to a vendor are very much appreciated.

Thank you in advance,

RF Dude

Howdy...

I can't recommend specifically anyone but here is a link to a vendor that Motorola used heavily on their tower sites and still is in use on the Global Signals (ex Pinnacle Towers) sites...


http://www.harksystems.com/tower/products_index.html

All of the tower sites that I have access to that use the mag card access also has a keypad if you don't have the card with you as well as remote actuation from a control point. I think the controller access is via dialup but that is because most of these systems are 10+ years old. The sites I have seem to work right most of the time but as you can imagine, having something at the bottom of a 500' tower hooked to a phone line in Florida in the summertime can create some cool visual effects..

When I was with AT&T Wireless, we changed the site door access from Simplex button locks to the TracAccess stuff. We had this nifty pocket box with a keypad and a speaker. The thing stored your activity and all of your access privilages on board. I had to update once a week to get a new code for the next week and upload my activity. You called a number on any phone, when it connected to the modem, you held the box up to the phone and it acoustically coupled the data transfer to the main database computer. It seemed to work OK except when you REALLY needed to update in a hurry, it would crap out and not hear the data right and you had to start over again. There was no remote access to the doors at that time, there may be now. I've been gone from there since '98. I know they still use that system on the old AT&T sites around here (now Cingular)for access but I don't know how complex that are running it.

There may be others but Hark was/is the most used access control that I've run across for tower sites here in Florida, probably because /\/\ owned a majority of those until 1999-2000 or so. You might contact someone at Global Signals to get their take on the Hark stuff if this even begins to fit your needs.

Good Luck!

Dave