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View Full Version : Do lottery terminals use Internet?



brawnypandora0
July 14th, 2011, 04:36 AM
How do lottery organizers know immediately after a draw where winning tickets were purchased and how many?

Before there was Internet, did they not know this kind of information?

sir.sargento
July 14th, 2011, 04:53 AM
I work at a convenient store in Iowa. The lotto machine there uses verizon's wireless interenet to send and receive information.

Edit: I also think they tried a sprint modem but wasn't working well in our area. I didn't ask the technician too many questions but I would say the ones in Iowa atleast use cellular wireless internet.

cariboo
July 14th, 2011, 07:32 AM
I've been away from it for quite a few years, but when I serviced lottery terminals, they used what was called leased lines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leased_line). At that time data transfer speeds were on the order of 2400bps, they may have upped the speed to 9600bps in the ensuing years, but the amount of data transferred, usually just a serial number, is very small so high speed data transfers aren't really needed.

They do send out data dumps to power the display during system down times. Here in BC the system is shutdown from 10:00PM to 6:00AM, you can still buy a lottery ticket, but the data is stored locally until the system opens up again.

KiwiNZ
July 14th, 2011, 08:16 AM
Homework again