POS Case Study

Sightseeing and eating out is more affordable with Discount Britain. By printing off vouchers from the DiscountBritain.co.uk website, consumers are able to save money at a variety of tourist attractions.

The vouchers are scanned by a bar code reader at the entrance booths of each attraction, and the information transferred back to a secure database. Eseye were remote connections; their reliability and security only become useful when the connection can be exploited by the enterprise to communicate with their assets. As part of M2M+ from Eseye, the range of enterprise support products has been designed to enable the connection onto the mobile Network without putting a burden on existing IT infrastructure.

Eseye supply data hosting and warehousing solutions for our customer’s M2M applications. Eseye’s data collection and synchronisation service is fully scalable as customer applications grow, and can provide tight coupling with the Mobile Network for efficient use of the cellular connections. Connection information from the Mobile Network can be used to offer additional value to the data, such as geo-referencing the location of the equipment when data was sent from the remote device.

Eseye’s customers use SMS and USSD gateways through the web services made available.

Frequently organisational security policies do not allow company data, and end user information to mix on the same network. Eseye supplies fully hosted web applications into these situations. Typically a data driven website is created by a project team comprising design staff from both the customer and Eseye. contacted when the engineering team were finding that connectivity from their existing SIM card supplier was unreliable, and it was impossible to find out why.

Fortunately one of Eseye’s engineering staff was due in the area later that week, so was able to take not only a SIM card for trials, but a wealth of experience in communications technologies, particularly GPRS and 3G.

Together, Eseye’s expert and Discount Britain’s engineering team fitted the Eseye SIM card and changed the APN to use Eseye’s infrastructure. Eseye’s APN has been designed and built to support M2M applications, and provide the services needed at all stages of M2M application development and deployment.

Within half a day, the problem had been resolved, Using the on-line, real time connection analysis tools integrated into the APN, it was possible to see the terminal connecting to the mobile network, and when the data was being sent. Merging this information with the data logs from the terminal and database, it was easy to spot and fix a timing problem in the terminal.

After successful trials in a number of UK sites, the terminals are now installed in France, Germany, Holland and the USA.

Eseye’s unified network means that in which ever country the terminals are installed, the APN is accessible using the same log in credentials. The terminals posted out to Europe, were switched on by the end users, and were so successful at immediately connecting to the database that the rollout was managed without needing a single support call.