The availability of Bluetooth Beacon Tracker is a function of on several related factors. This page lists all the parties involved and their responsibilities.

Electricity

The customer is responsible of the availability of electricity. An adequate backup system should be installed in locations where there could be power outage problems.

Internet connection

The customer is responsible of the availability of the Internet connection. If a BLE node is not able to connect to Internet through a wired or wireless internet connection then the information about the BLE beacons detected will be lost. The BLE nodes do not have an internal buffer. All our customers with concerns related to the Internet connection opted for these solutions:

1. the local version of Bluetooth Beacon Tracker – with this solution the BLE nodes will exchange data with a local sever (on which runs the Bluetooth Beacon Tracker software) and there is no need to be worried about data being lost due to the drop of the Internet connection.
2. a wireless connection provided by 4G/LTE device – at this link there are some examples of these devices.

April Brother BLE nodes

Manufacturing defects

April Brother (or the distributor) is responsible for the warranty related to the BLE nodes. If a BLE node is defective and it can not communicate with the Indoor Tracking server then the information about the BLE beacons detected will be lost. However we would like to underline that our customers have never encountered any kind of physical defect on the April Brother BLE nodes so far.

Firmware

The reliability of the April Brother firmware is not under our responsibility. Anyway April Brother releases new upgrades only after several months of testing. They have hundred thousands of customers spread all around the world and this means that their firmware upgrades are always bulletproof.

Parameters

A wrong configuration of the BLE nodes might lead to unexpected behaviors. If a BLE node is not configured properly and it can not communicate with the Indoor Tracking server and then the information about the BLE beacons detected will be lost. The BLE nodes must be configured following the instructions inside the documentation.

Bluetooth Beacon Tracker cloud server

The Bluetooth Beacon Tracker cloud server is robust because we rely on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and we are able to scale the resources dynamically based on the number of BLE nodes that need to be managed and the number of BLE beacons that need to be tracked. This means that there are virtually no limits regarding the computational power that we can provide. Our suite of products based on nodes has been launched in 2010 and we have not had down times, so far. The Amazon SLA is around 99,95% (click here to see details).

Even if the reliability of the AWS is high, please keep in mind that the overall performance of the solution in which our services is integrated is also influenced by:

• the performances/reliability of the network that goes from your physical site (where the nodes are physically installed) to the Indoor Tracking server.
• the performances/reliability of the network that goes from the location where the Accuware API are called to the Indoor Tracking server.

It is clear that the performances/reliability of these networks are not under our control. This is one of the reasons you might be interested in the standalone installation of our technologies.