The positives and negatives of a one-make system
Compatibility is a major talking point for AV control solutions. Geoff Meads looks at the benefits and downsides of a one-make system.
As a child, I was a massive Lego fan. I just loved everything about it. The simplicity, the specific kits and the freedom it gave you when you wanted to build your own creations. I made all sorts of things from houses to cars and boats. I ended up with so much Lego that it filled an entire drawer of the cupboard in my bedroom. Ah, such happy days!
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Apart from the world of construction possibilities Lego offered, there was something inherent to its design that was perhaps more important than any other aspect – compatibility. Whatever bits of Lego you owned they would always go together. How great would it be if all ‘systems’ were like that?
What is a one-brand system?
I came into this industry, like so many others, via HiFi. That’s a world where a collection of items from disparate manufacturers are brought together and connected via standard-ish interfaces. You could choose a turntable from one specialist manufacturer then an amplifier from someone else and speakers from yet another source.
As multi-room audio became ‘a thing’ the need for unified control (and the lack of standardised communications protocol in the market at the time) pushed dealers into specifying one-make systems to make sure it all worked together. I remember Scottish manufacturer Linn’s Knekt being one such system that was popular with many UK dealers.
History
When it comes to networking, both approaches are available. In the 1990s I remember the Novell networks which ran on Coax (10Base2) in corporate buildings. In the early days of networks within the ‘smart home’ industry, a Cisco Certified engineer was a highly desirable employee, and for good reason.
As a company Cisco offered all sorts of equipment from small, affordable items suitable for the small office/home office (‘SOHO’) environment right up to the ‘infrastructure’ grade kit used within the backbones of ISPs and the Internet itself. Cisco’s training was both robust, available in many markets and globally recognised.
Nowadays, the requirement for Cisco certification seems to have taken a back seat. I can see why too. Although it was technically thorough, it was also a massive undertaking for a student. Months of out-of-hours learning if you were to do it properly. At the time, much of the training covered configuration using a command line. This meant learning commands that were Cisco-specific. Although the early modules of the courseware delivered a strong foundation in general networking, the later modules covered practices exclusive to Cisco.
In the following years, networks for residential properties used a more diverse range of equipment. Equipment from the likes of Netgear, HP, Linksys, D-Link, TP-Link and others were thrown together and configured piece by piece to form a complete (although somewhat disparate) network.
More recently things have changed again thanks to manufacturers like Ubiquiti. While their start in the residential industry was largely driven by their access points, their routers, switches and cloud control have pushed them forward and into a large, perhaps even ‘dominant’, force in our industry.
The positives
So, why might we choose a one-make system for a network? Well, there are a few reasons…
The first must be compatibility. Like Lego, the chances of two pieces of hardware from the manufacturer being compatible are very high, if not guaranteed. This is particularly useful if you need to use specific advanced protocols like spanning tree, PoE or vLan.
The second advantage is technical support. If you need to call a help desk and your entire network is built on that company’s products, then they can almost always get to the bottom of any issue.
Next, we have control. In some cases, the configuration of the whole network is available from one dashboard. You can easily see traffic bottlenecks and spot items that have gone offline. In addition, for wireless systems, you can see how host devices are moving between access points. If you set things up right you can sometimes find that remote control is included as standard, saving hours of travel during those times when a simple reboot will solve an issue.
Finally, if you buy all your kit from one source you are more likely to achieve a better margin, either immediately or via loyalty bonuses.
The negatives
There is no such thing as a free lunch and there are, of course, downsides to specifying a one-make system…
Firstly, it’s rare that a single manufacturer will be the jack of all trades and master of all trades at the same time. They might make superb access points and routers but are their cameras the best around? Moreover, as product lines change, manufacturers can go on and off the boil with their current offer. Some years it will be great, the next year there might be a better alternative elsewhere.
Secondly, product availability can cause issues. If you are relying on one supplier for all parts of a system, what do you do if one key component goes out of stock for a period? We’ve seen this with products from all over the industry in recent years and, with chip suppliers being under huge stress and an ‘interesting’ global economy, we can expect this to continue for a while longer yet.
Finally, there is product obsolesce. It’s not unusual for manufacturers to withdraw from a product sub-category altogether if they are not successful at it. If an installed product fails and the chosen manufacturer has no replacement, then we’re forced to look elsewhere. Suddenly some of the advantages we gained from using s ingle supplier disappear.
Conclusions
As is often the case, there is no single right answer. In some cases, we can divide and conquer. We might let one manufacturer be the sole supplier for the backbone of our network and use another, perhaps more specialist manufacturer, for security devices for example.
Whichever approach you choose it’s worth remembering that the simplest systems are usually the most reliable. Simpler systems have less to go wrong and, when they do go wrong, they tend to be easier to troubleshoot. Whether this applies to one-make systems, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
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