Connecting 60 Commercial Properties

Smaller commercial property managers know this situation: properties scattered across DACH, a mix of old and new buildings. None with managed connectivity back to the head office. Cameras recording to local NVRs. Access control that doesn't sync between sites. Building automation that only works on-site. Plus the wish to offer tenants and visitors public WiFi at select locations. The team spends two days a week driving between properties.

SD-WAN seemed like the obvious answer—but for 60 sites, quotes came back at €15,000–25,000 per month. Hardware, per-site licensing, managed services. Before sourcing a single internet connection or integrating a single camera.

This case study shows how connectivity, video surveillance, and public WiFi can be done differently.

What They Needed

The requirements weren't complicated. They just needed everything to work together:

• Secure connectivity between all 60 properties and their central office
• Video surveillance accessible from anywhere, stored centrally
• Access control for the commercial properties with tenant management
• Building automation visibility for HVAC systems
• One provider they could call when something didn't work

That last point mattered more than the technical requirements. They'd been burned before by setups where the camera vendor blamed the network vendor who blamed the ISP who blamed the firewall. Nobody wants that job.

Our Approach

We proposed ZERO-CONNECT as the foundation. One managed CPE at each site, connecting back to our infrastructure over their existing internet. No ripping out what worked. No carrier changes. Just a small router behind their internet connection that creates secure tunnels to every other site and to central services.

The pricing made sense for their scale: €69 per site per month, plus €1 per Mbps for actual bandwidth used. For 60 sites with modest bandwidth needs, they were looking at roughly €5,000–6,000 monthly. Less than a third of what the SD-WAN vendors quoted.

But the real value wasn't the cost savings. It was having one throat to choke.

Sourcing Connectivity

Half the sites already had decent connections. Consumer-grade, 100–500 Mbps asymmetric. Good enough for cameras and building systems. Those just needed our CPE installed behind the existing router.

The other half was mixed. Some had DSL that barely qualified as broadband. A few had no fixed-line options at all. Rural locations, industrial areas where the telcos never bothered to build out infrastructure.

We helped them source alternatives:

• Fiber where available: Coordinated with local providers, handled the paperwork, got circuits installed
• LTE/5G for remote sites: Business-grade mobile connections with external antennas for better signal. Not as fast as fiber, but reliable enough for cameras and building systems
• Dual connectivity for critical sites: Primary fiber plus LTE backup. Automatic failover. The HQ and their most important retail properties got this treatment

We're an NSP, but we don't do last-mile. We run our own network (AS215197), but we're not going to compete with Deutsche Telekom on consumer fiber. What we can do is help find the right local provider for each site. We know who delivers, who doesn't, and what actually works in which region.

Installation Without Site Visits

60 sites across the DACH region. Sending engineers to each one would have taken months and cost a fortune. Instead, we shipped pre-configured CPEs directly to each property and talked the local facility manager or electrician through the installation.

The process:

1. We pre-configure the CPE with site-specific settings
2. Ship it to the property with a simple instruction sheet
3. Local contact plugs in power and network cable
4. CPE phones home, we verify connectivity
5. 15-minute call to walk through any issues

Most installations took under an hour. A few needed longer calls when the local internet setup was unusual. One site had the ISP router in a locked cabinet that nobody had the key to. That one took longer.

Total deployment time for all 60 sites: three months. One site visit for a particularly difficult location. Everything else handled over the phone.

Central Video Surveillance

They had cameras at about 40 of the properties. Different brands, different ages, different recording setups. Some recorded locally to NVRs that nobody checked. Some had cloud subscriptions that had lapsed. A few had nothing at all.

We suggested Ubiquiti UniFi Protect. Not because it's the cheapest or the most feature-rich, but because it's solid, the management interface is clean, and it integrates well with everything else. The customer went with it, we helped with the implementation.

The architecture:

• Cameras at each site: UniFi G5 and G6 series, different models for different use cases
• Central recording: All footage streams directly to a UniFi Protect application running in our datacenter
• Managed service: We handle the infrastructure, they get a clean web interface and mobile app—access via VPN

Their team can now pull up any camera from any site on their phones. Security incidents get investigated in minutes instead of days. When a tenant reports a break-in attempt, they can review footage before the police arrive.

Storage lives in our Frankfurt datacenter. 30 days retention standard, longer for specific cameras on request. Their data never leaves Germany, which matters for GDPR and for their tenants' comfort.

Building Systems Integration

About 20 of the newer properties had building management systems for HVAC. Different vendors, different protocols, but all capable of network connectivity. The problem was getting that connectivity back to somewhere useful.

Once ZERO-CONNECT was in place, the building systems could talk to a central monitoring platform. We helped connect:

• HVAC controllers: Temperature setpoints, runtime monitoring, fault alerts
• Energy meters: Consumption data for billing and optimization
• Access control: Door controllers with central credential management
• IoT sensors: Water leak detection, humidity monitoring, occupancy sensing

We're not building automation experts. We didn't configure their BMS or optimize their HVAC schedules. But we coordinated with their system integrators and software vendors to make sure the data could flow from each property to wherever it needed to go. Currently that's a backhaul to their management systems running on AWS. We just provide the secure connectivity between the buildings and the cloud.

For access control specifically, centralized management meant they could provision and revoke tenant credentials from one place. New tenant moves in? Add their credentials to the system, select which doors they can access, done. Tenant moves out? Revoke access across all their properties in seconds.

The Results

Six months in:

• All 60 sites connected with secure, managed networking
• Central video surveillance covering 40+ properties
• Building systems visibility for 20 properties with modern automation
• One invoice instead of dozens of separate contracts
• One support contact for network, video, and connectivity issues

The team that used to spend two days a week driving between sites now handles most issues remotely. When someone does need to visit a property, they already know what they're walking into because they checked the cameras and building systems first.

Total monthly cost came in around €6,500 for everything. Connectivity, monitoring, video infrastructure, support. About a quarter of what the enterprise SD-WAN vendors quoted for just the networking piece.