We have Stanley wireless locks in two dorms (802.15.4 not 802.11) . One dorm things worked very well in and the other was a bit of a nightmare. We had issues with interference especially from student wireless devices especially Zigbee devices. The locks dropped offline and batteries died frequently. Due to the limited bandwidth in this spectrum if too many locks are communicating with a gateway at a time, downloads would be aborted and the lock would have to try again. Unfortunately these locks purge their database before downloading. So when a download is aborted, the locks lose all credentials and students lose access to their rooms until the lock is able to complete a successful download. Poor design in my opinion.
We found that turning the beacon time up so that the locks communicated less frequently resolved most of these issues, but at the cost of individual locks taking longer to receive new badges unless a download was forced. Since making this change we have not had the issue of students being locked out of their rooms and have gone from changing batteries once a month on some locks to lasting the entire year. Beacon times were originally configured at 60 seconds by Stanley and we increased the beacon to one hour. *Robert J. Ellison* *Systems Architect – Computing, Telecommunications, and Media Services Adjunct Professor – Computer Information Systems & Technology* *University of Pittsburgh at Bradford & Titusville Campuses* <https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjellison>office +1 814-362-7666 fax +1 814-362-5279 On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 9:23 AM Brian J David <davi...@bc.edu> wrote: > Thanks for the information Bruce. We have the same locks. about 1800 of > them. Some of the batteries are dying quickly. Mostly Bathrooms because > they get the most use. Do you find the Lock antenna to be very powerful? > > Brian > > On 3/13/17 7:55 AM, Osborne, Bruce W (Network Operations) wrote: > > We have been using Assa Abloy wireless locks in our newest residences on our > 802.1X SSID. The AA batteries do not last as long as advertised. We place Aps > in rooms and the lock wireless antenna is on the insode of the door. > Obviously, rekeying maintenance is reduced. The locks update once a day. If > they see an unknown badge, they check toe server to get a new badge list. > > Other than that, be sure to stagger the regular lock scanning times. When we > first deployed, they has 600+ locks all trying to hit our management VM-based > server at the same time. The server was overwhelmed. With times staggered, > the server now handles the load. > > > Bruce Osborne > Senior Network Engineer > Network Operations - Wireless > > (434) 592-4229 > > LIBERTY UNIVERSITY > Training Champions for Christ since 1971 > > -----Original Message----- > From: Brian David [mailto:davi...@bc.edu <davi...@bc.edu>] > Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2017 6:59 AM > Subject: Wireless Door lock systems > > All, > > I was wondering what other Universities experience with wireless door locks? > > How have the door locks been working? Is there a lot of maintenance with your > systems? > > For example battery life, wifi connection problems, broken locks. > > > Brian > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent > Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent > Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. > > > > -- > > *Brian J David* > > *Senior Network Systems Engineer* > > *Boston College* > > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at > http://www.educause.edu/discuss. > > -- *Robert J. Ellison* *Systems Architect - Computing, Telecommunications, and Media Services* *Adjunct Professor – Computer Information Systems & Technology* *University of Pittsburgh at Bradford & **Titusville** Campuses* office +1814-362-7666 <%2B1%20814-362-7666> fax +1 814-362-5279 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
