The internet went down: why your condominium's doors should keep working
4 min read
Sooner or later, your condominium's internet will go down. It might be roadwork on the street, a problem at the provider or a router fried by a storm. The question isn't whether it will happen, but what happens to the doors when it does.
The risk of relying on the cloud to open the door
Many modern systems run in the cloud, and that brings real advantages: you can manage them from anywhere, get updates without a technician's visit and keep backups off site. The trouble starts when the decision to open the door depends on the cloud too. If every entry has to check with a server on the internet, a shaky connection turns into a line on the sidewalk.
At a front desk, that's unacceptable. Residents can't be left standing outside because the provider is doing maintenance, and staff members can't be locked out just because the router restarted.
Where the decision should happen
The safest design puts the decision as close to the door as possible. Face recognition terminals keep the list of authorized people in their own memory and compare the face right there. The internet is for managing the system, not for letting people in.
In this design, each part has a clear role:
- The terminal recognizes the person and unlocks the door on its own.
- A local device on the condominium's network keeps the terminals up to date and records every access.
- The cloud handles the management dashboard, the backups and the monitoring.
Splitting the roles this way keeps the impact of any failure contained. Without the cloud, you can't manage things remotely for a while. Without a terminal, only that one door is affected. No single failure locks the whole condominium out.
What stops and what keeps running when the connection drops
Even in a well-designed system, something stops without internet, and it's worth knowing what so you aren't caught off guard. The management dashboard, which you reach over the internet, is unavailable until the connection comes back. Changes made in the meantime, such as enrolling a new resident or creating an invitation, have to wait.
What can't stop is entry for the people who are already enrolled. And the record shouldn't be lost either: accesses that happened during the outage need to show up in the history afterward, so nobody is left without an answer about who came in during that time.
What if the condominium's equipment shuts down?
Power outages and faulty equipment happen too. The same logic applies: if the local server stops, the terminals should keep working with the list they already have. When it comes back, it should pick up where it left off on its own, without anyone having to go to the condominium and resend records by hand.
It also matters that someone finds out. A device that shuts down silently can go unnoticed for days, and that's exactly the window in which changes stop reaching the terminals.
Power is the other half of the story
The internet is only part of the problem. Without power, no terminal works, and the lock behaves according to the type installed: some stay locked, others release. That choice directly affects security and the emergency exit, and it should be made together with the installer and whoever is responsible for the building's safety.
A UPS (battery backup) for the terminals, the lock and the network equipment is usually a small investment compared to the headaches it prevents. It's worth including in the project when you replace the access control system, not after the first blackout.
Questions to ask before you sign
When you compare proposals, these questions help you tell a resilient system from a fragile one:
- If the internet goes down right now, can residents still get in?
- Where does face recognition happen: on the terminal or on an external server?
- What happens to the accesses recorded during the outage?
- When the connection comes back, does the system recover on its own, or does someone have to step in?
- How does the company find out that the condominium is offline or that its equipment is down?
- Do you have to open ports on the condominium's router for the system to work?
How Abriu handles it
At Abriu, recognition happens on Hikvision terminals, which store who is allowed in and keep unlocking the doors without internet, even with the condominium's Abriu hub turned off. The hub sits on the local network, next to the terminals, and keeps reading the access history over the internal network while the internet is out.
Only the dashboard depends on the connection. When it comes back, the hub resumes its pending uploads on its own, and a terminal that was off receives whatever changed as soon as it's back on. The link to the cloud is made from the inside out, with no ports opened on the router, and our monitoring center notices when a condominium stops responding.