Secure connectivity for smart city kiosks

Orange Barrel Media uses Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions to manage hundreds of interactive kiosks, automate operations, and scale connected infrastructure across the United States

Orange Barrel Media builds and operates interactive kiosks and large-format digital displays in cities across the United States. Through its IKE Smart City brand, the company runs close to 900 kiosks in markets from coast to coast, offering wayfinding, transit information, local maps, job boards, and free public Wi-Fi. For the cities they serve, the kiosks generate advertising revenue, deliver emergency and public safety messaging, support tourists with multilingual information, and provide community organizations with a platform to reach residents.

Behind every kiosk is a connected ecosystem of devices: two displays, a single-board computer, and a network video recorder. Orange Barrel Media collects metrics from thousands of devices every minute. Reaching them once required exposing them to the public internet through port forwarding and maintaining a static IP address at every site, a cost that quickly multiplied across hundreds of locations.

This was risky. Internet-facing devices widened the attack surface, while a traditional VPN wasn't practical because every kiosk used the same flat subnet. Orange Barrel Media needed a way to secure remote access without redesigning its network.

Working with Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions, Orange Barrel Media rebuilt how it connects and secures its kiosks, then automated the process so it could grow without adding manual work.

Setting up each site by hand was slow: create the site, attach the router, name every device behind it, then configure the router so the pieces find each other. Done manually, that took roughly seven to eight minutes per kiosk, which does not scale across a network this size. So, the team built its own software on top of Ericsson's API to handle the work end-to-end. Now, an operator enters a router's hardware address, marks the site as private, and clicks update. In the background, the system assigns licenses, creates and names the site according to the company's own convention, and configures every device. The operations team can deploy a kiosk without touching the network at all.

Each device sits behind carrier-grade network address translation on a dynamic SIM, preventing direct inbound access from the outside. Firewall rules in NetCloud Exchange control traffic between kiosks and Orange Barrel Media’s Amazon Web Services environment, while public Wi-Fi remains isolated from internal systems. The result is a network that stays closed to the outside by default and opens only the paths the company chooses. Each kiosk caches content locally, so information and advertising remain available even when cellular networks become congested during large events. That resilience helps the company deliver dependable service without wired connectivity.

The combination of connectivity and automation changed how the team works day to day. Engineers who once hunted for public IP addresses to access individual devices can now reach any kiosk by name through a single application. Monitoring runs across thousands of devices every minute without exposing them. Operations staff deploy new sites with a click, so growth no longer depends on networking expertise or hours of manual setup. 

Nearly 600 kiosk sites now connect through Secure Connect rather than the public internet, reducing reliance on paid static addressing and giving engineers confidence that the network can scale without adding unnecessary risk.

Stronger security posture

Hundreds of devices moved off the public internet and were placed behind carrier-grade network address translation, and firewalled from the company's cloud environment.

Provisioning at scale

Site setup dropped from a multi-step manual task of several minutes to a single click, so operations staff can deploy kiosks without networking expertise.

Simpler, lower-cost connectivity

A single cloud appliance and secure tunnels replace per-site public addressing, reducing reliance on paid static IP addresses.

A responsive support partnership

Direct access to Ericsson NCX updates and fast turnarounds, including three product bugs identified and resolved together.

Orange Barrel Media sees opportunities to extend this model even further. The team plans to bring the same automation approach to its large-format displays, reuse the software it has already built, and continue developing new integrations with Ericsson. Future initiatives include simplifying deployment and maintenance with routers that can power and manage connected cameras through a single device, as well as adopting eSIM technology to eliminate manual SIM swaps across hundreds of locations.

For a company whose business depends on reliable connectivity in every market it enters, having a wireless foundation it can secure, automate, and scale gives Orange Barrel Media the confidence to keep growing.