Remote Diagnostics For CE Integrators

For example one story doing the rounds is of a certain West Australian home entertainment and systems integration company that was asked to go to the Caribbean to do a major AV installation on a luxury cruiser.
After completing the installation, some problems seemed to persist and at this point, the company technicians decided to call the OEMs head office in the US for support.

Upon making the call to the help desk, the operator immediately responded with words to the effect:”I thought you guys were going to call me today” The bewildered West Australians soon discovered Remote Diagnostics starts with the insertion of the very first Ethernet cable!

However, other vendors seem to have a handle on this technology.

Bill Coghill, Integration Specialist for Hills SVL says that a lot of their dealers are “really big on remote diagnostics”.
In fact says Coghill, the biggest advantage he sees with RD is the elimination of user error. “Since it’s only a matter of opening up a port, on remote jobs and with ADSL”, says Coghill, the whole concept of RD is “now really easy”.

In fact he notes, “we even have a dealer that uses it to monitor the sound in a church.”

Having said that, Coghill does not recommend RD to all and sundry.

“Where there are security concerns, I would not recommend RD unless there is password protection”, says Coghill.
So what was once only the domain of NASA and the US Military has now become an out-of-the-box solution for local integrators.

And it seems co-location and on-site will become the loneliest two words in the English language.