Gatwick’s Cloud-Based FIDS Screen Set-Up Touted As Resilient, But, Ummm, Welll …

August 21, 2018 by Dave Haynes

 

The nightmare digital signage problem at Gatwick Airport Monday was resolved around 5 PM local time, with the problem isolated to a Vodafone fiber optic cable being inadvertently cut – perhaps by a construction crew.

The 1,200 or so flight information display system (FIDS) screens went offline for much of the day and travellers were reduced to reading departures and gate information off a whiteboard updated with marker pens by airport staff.

Turns out the airport’s much touted, award-winning FIDS set-up is all cloud-based and evidently had no working (at least) redundancy built in to the design – so if the connectivity that retrieved the flight information from a cloud-based host went down, connectivity would roll over to something like an LTE mobile data network, or even the airport’s passenger WiFi system.

It appears the screens are system on chip displays, which cut out a lot of cost of PCs. It wouldn’t matter what was driving the screens if there was no connectivity, and local caching would mean what’s on the screens would be old in minutes – and the outage lasted hours.

https://twitter.com/lizmezzo/status/1031458857472679936

The full story isn’t out, so maybe there is more to it – but it would seem that if there was failover connectivity built into the final design, it didn’t work. Read this news release …

Gatwick, the airport said in a Feb. 2018 news release, is the world’s first major airport to introduce a cloud-based Flight Information Display System (FIDS) – an innovative, cost effective system that is easily scalable, more flexible and resilient, and requires considerably less infrastructure and maintenance.

Legacy FID systems require software to be loaded on a separate PC behind the screen to run them – whereas the airport’s 1,200 cloud-based screens now connect via a web browser from any operating system. This takes up only 3Mbps of bandwidth – so the new real-time system is extremely fast and responsive to updates – which is key in times of disruption.

The new system – VisionAir – can also run natively on smart TVs – saving on infrastructure and maintenance costs, and demand on engineers’ time. The new system is also:

The VisionAir project started back in 2015 when Gatwick Airport decided to develop cloud-based FIDS in line with the airport’s cloud migration strategy. AirportLabs developed the solution and the system went live with 1,200 screens by the middle of 2017 and has been providing uninterrupted service since then.

  1. Absolutely no excuse for not being able to cache the content (including HTML5) on each SoC display (assuming not a consumer SmartTV) and sync the data across the LAN to display the FIDS. This is a mandatory requirement for any credible CMS regardless of the end device if they want to be considered for enterprise digital signage deployments.

    Pointing to a hosted web page and hoping the server serves up the web content and the connection remains constant, is asking for trouble.

  2. The cloud-based display system can be cost effective but don’t you think it is a way where they will lose their effective working.

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