Recently, one of our client came to us with a problem he needed to solve. He has multiple stores around the Dallas Metropolitan area, all with our DVR system with a Centralize Monitoring System. He would monitor his employees from the CMS and whenever he wanted to talk to his employees he gave them a good ol' phone call. Here came the problem. The employees would not pick up the phone call when it's clearly ringing in front of them. That got our client pretty irritated. Upon hearing this problem, we all know what we needed to get; an Intercom System.
So you can imaging what kind of applications the intercom systems can be used on. Upon shopping around for reliable intercom system we came up with two solutions.
One is the Aiphone IPW-1A system coupled with IF-DA
To be honest, these units didn't have the best documentation. Before I had these units in my hand, I had no idea how this operated and had little idea of its complete functionality. Once I had it in my hands, it was pretty straight forward.
The IPW-1A basically has two modes. They call it "direct mode" and "broadcast mode". What broadcast mode does is it broadcasts UDP packets to the entire network its connected to. This means there can be multiple recipients. But on this mode the packets cannot go outside of the private network unless you setup a VPN tunnel across multiple networks. On the other mode, direct mode, you have the ability to pin-point the IP address where the unit sends the packet to. So with this functionality you can broadcast the UDP packet across the internet.
The command station is a Windows PC based software, which comes free. You simply install this software on the PC and if all of the network configuration on the IPW-1A is setup properly and the correct port is forwarded to the PC, the software lists the locations automatically. So there is no network configuration required at the PC, which is nice.
Another system Aiphone offer is IS-IPMV and IS-IPDV system. This system offers video communication as well as voice communication. I haven't received this system for demo so I'll save this portion for a later post.
There are many more I can tell you about the first system but that would make this post very long. So if you have more question about this system you can do a simple web search or visit www.aiphone.com. You may also write to me with the questions, if you would like.
