Award-winning event and broadcast communications specialist, Green-GO, is celebrating sales of its Wireless Belt-Pack X (WBPX) reaching the golden number of 10,000 – just as its wired counterpart, the BPX, had already done.
To mark this milestone, the manufacturer, ELC, kept aside the WBPX unit with serial number 10,000 – had it gold-plated, just as it had done with the 10,000th BPX and presented it to ELC founder and Green-GO inventor, Joost van Eenbergen.
The WBPX units with serial numbers either side of 10000 were dispatched as usual to Green-GO’s global customer network. As chance would have it, the shipment went about as far as it could go, to Green-GO’s distributor for Australia & New Zealand, Sydney-based Event Communications Australia.
Opening the package was sales and marketing manager Rod McKinnon. “With that particular shipment,” he recalled. “We had a backorder, so I feverishly started looking for the WBPX because I wanted to get them out to customers as quickly as possible. As I ripped into the boxes, I saw the ‘9’ serial numbers and then ‘10’, so I thought ‘I’m gonna have 10,000 in there somewhere!’ And then I thought, ‘Hang on a minute – if I was in the factory shipping those numbers, I wouldn’t have let it go in the box’!”<
Event Communications sells Green-GO systems to a broad range of markets, as McKinnon explains. “We’re all about infrastructure and safety – without good communication, you have an unsafe environment. So it’s a broad spectrum – everyone needs to talk. We cover every need from audio, lighting, front of house, box office, house of worship, schools and high schools and, increasingly, security.”
McKinnon is full of praise for the product itself. He believes it is so successful because it offers an unbeatable price-performance ratio. “It’s easy to use, versatile, and cost-effective,” he said. “They’re the three main selling points for our customers.”
On its launch in 2011, the Green-GO digital comms system won a prestigious PLASA Award for Innovation, the impressed judges commenting, “The ELC Green-GO digital show communications system brings affordable show communications into the digital realm . . .”
The arrival of Green-GO was welcomed because it took a new, innovative approach to crew communications. The Ethernet network-based digital intercom system has the advantage of having no single point of failure, because it is not dependent on a central matrix. In fact, the matrix and the configuration file is stored in each unit processor – whether wired or wireless beltpack, outstation or multi-channel desk – all of which are powered via PoE (Power over Ethernet). What’s more, as we have seen, it delivers these advantages at a price-point that makes it attractive to users worldwide.
McKinnon, however, is far from annoyed at missing out on the 10,000th WBPX: “I’m really grateful to be involved,” he said. “The Green-GO guys have supported us really well, and in times of great stress. Even with what I call the ‘chip fight’, which affected the whole world – Green-GO redesigned the product with new chips. The speed at which they turned that around was amazing. I don’t think any other manufacturer was able to move as quickly. And their Control 5 software is outstanding. To do that at the same time – it’s talent-plus from a manufacturer!”
He added: “Without Green-GO being able to do that and continue shipping products, it would have been very difficult for Event Communications. I’m very grateful for the relationship that we’ve got.”
ELC and Green-GO’s Silvio Cibien stated: ”It’s a very special achievement, reaching these figures. Since day one, we were quite confident we would get there! I think about the users: there are over 10,000 Green-GO wired beltpack and 10,000 wireless beltpack users in the world – even more if we count the numerous rental company customers – yet we have such a low rate of demand for service. Green-GO has a real footprint in the comms market – and our R&D team is working hard for the next step.”
