Description:
Patent status: US Utility Patent 9,489,814 and 15/279,856 (continuation with notice of allowance)
Overview:
Organizations that own, control, or manage multiple facilities or buildings such as businesses, universities, and government entities are often faced with the challenge of managing and communicating problems such as fires. Remote and dispersed sites often include one or more independently operating fire alarm control panels. Communication between various fire alarm panels are most often configured in a ring topology or bus topology using a token passing protocol. This presents issues when electronic communication components fail it becomes difficult to pinpoint where the fault occurred, as many times the faults are cascaded throughout all the communication components connected via ring or bus topologies. Further, in order to maintain a dedicated ring topology fire network 4 fiber are required at each building, and many organizations do not have enough fiber to spare to support this connection or struggle to provide this amount of fiber. This new, patented system alleviates these issues and allows technicians the ability to quickly resolve network communication failures.
Market opportunity:
• Fire detection market is a growing $5.6 billion market, growing to over $8.3 billion by 2020
• Significant growth opportunity in commercial, industrial, government, and educational buildings with a CAGR of ~7%
• Opportunity to retrofit existing buildings as well as new construction
Key advantages:
• New “tree” topology
• Less electronic components
• Simplifies troubleshooting to a single building
• Time of troubleshooting and network down time is significantly reduced
• Provide redundancy/multiple pathways for each network
• Uses less fiber (1 pair per building instead of 2 in ring/tree topology)
