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Mercury MP series versus LP series
Ankita Chakraborty avatar
Written by Ankita Chakraborty
Updated over 4 months ago

If you are unfamiliar with the Mercury access control line, Mercury is a manufacturer of non-proprietary access control hardware that powers some of the world’s leading access control systems. Brands like Genea, Lenel, Avigilon, Genetec, ACRE and more rely on Mercury to provide trusted and reliable access control hardware to provide an industry-leading hardware foundation to these systems. Mercury has been around since the 1990s and has earned a brand that is synonymous with reliability, scalability and open.


The Mercury hardware line has gone through several iterative generations since its inception with the SCP line, to the Ethernet Protocol (EP) line and then onto their Linux Protocol (LP) series. Now, Mercury is introducing their latest series, Mercury Protocol or MP. Why is this newsworthy? Glad you asked.

The transitions from SCP to EP and then LP were mostly iterative in nature. The functions of the system remained largely unchanged with improvements largely confined to processing speed, networking capabilities and memory capacity. The MP line however, is a paradigm shift to the next generation of access control systems. With MP, Mercury is opening up their operating system to the community of application developers like Genea to extend the capabilities of the system beyond access control into IOT and other edge applications far beyond traditional security.

Additionally, Mercury MP series controllers allow for huge improvements in data security, data transmission encryption, control of reader firmware through OSDP updates and much, much more.

LP v. MP Translation Chart

Controller

LP Series

MP Series

1501

LP1501

MP1501

1502

LP1502

MP1502

2500

LP2500

MP2500

4502

LP4502

MP4502

Things to know:

  1. Genea supports customers that have EP, LP and MP Series controllers in their environment

  2. If you are upgrading an EP or LP series controller to MP you do not need to update the downstream SIO controllers

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