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The rise and rise of cheap hotels has bred a new variant of smart hotel where the door and the room can be controlled by a mobile phone application. With no room service, selectable coloured interior lighting, no fridge, and no door key Mi-Pad in New Zealand may be an indication of what hotels will be like in the future. With a smartphone app to control the front door, lighting, order room service, room temperature, and message other guests the hotel truly offers self service. If this catches on, how many other hotels will switch to automated service to save money on staff wages?
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday November 19 2018, @03:15PM
Any decent electric strike lock will fail secure or fail open as required.
But then can always be opened from the inside by the use of... a handle - complete physical override of the selected setting to facilitate escape.
Or break-glasses which literally cut to the power to the lock overriding any software-failure that may have caused them to lock accidentally.
Additionally, any decent access control system is tied into the fire alarm anyway. It's one wire.
I operate the system for schools - you think we're any less compliant with fire safety when we have regular inspections and children as young as 3 who could get trapped in a room?
Power failure? Almost all systems have battery backup, just like a fire alarm does. In our case, every door for 8 hours+. And then on power failure the choice of "fail-secure" / "fail-open" is made on a per-door basis, but can STILL always be overrode from inside.
1) Your guys need to check their systems better. We just don't get failures like that. We get human-error-programming failures, that's about it. Once, 450KW of power cables arced together across phases. Worst that happens was one controller went a bit screwy but still worked. We just reset it and all was well. I've been using this particular system for 10 years across three models of controllers (because of upgrades / new features / etc. that we needed, not failures).
2) Wood/pipes - yeah, your people are bodging it, you can't do anything reliably with such people. P.S. things like anti-pass-back and audit software should be flagging your "extended stays" where you don't sign out.
3) Human error. That happens. Nothing you can do about it.
4) My system installer I happen to know really well (we've worked together for years across several jobs, and by chance he also worked for my new employers, etc.). I know he's not lying when he tells me the system in use is the same as the one on an RAF base just down the road. One of our upgrades was to get "lockdown" functionality, in case of an on-site shooter etc., which we had to do by upgrading to the model they use at the military base which has always used that functionality.
Any decent access control system can do all these things, and has had all these problems worked out in advance.
(P.S. don't buy Paxton).