>I noticed yesterday that the arcade at the movie theater switched to electronic tokens. The card dispenser had a cellular antenna, thus I assume the whole thin

>I noticed yesterday that the arcade at the movie theater switched to electronic tokens. The card dispenser had a cellular antenna, thus I assume the whole thing was completely remotely managed and probably just took a few hours to install without having to provision any local services (like a POTS line) except electricity. I used to work at a firm that made/distributed/maintained gaming machines, and that's exactly correct. It came about in a roudabout way, though. Some jurisdictions mandate active management and reporting from 'fixed-odds betting terminals' and historically that was done with POTS and overnight modem dialing. That moved across to 3G because the on-site complexity was drastically lower, but it was a slow move due to the carrier and new hardware costs. Now those costs are barely anything, and the back-end hardware is already in-place for FOBT. So it makes a lot of sense to move all the other terminals over to this system even if it's only for maintenance reporting/alerting, and not odds/configuration management. The electricity metering industry tells a nearly identical story. Now every meter might as well be a smart meter, because everything needed to achieve that has to be present anyway, it's just a case of rolling out the end customer devices.