Orion Entrance Control Brand Guidelines: Laconia, New Hampshire Speed Gates Since 2009

A founder-led turnstile maker in New Hampshire.

Orion Entrance Control, Inc., which shortens its name to Orion ECI, is a maker of turnstiles and speed gates based in Laconia, New Hampshire. The company says it was founded in 2009. Its founder is Steve Caroselli: a company announcement carried by SecurityInfoWatch in January 2016 and a report in Security Today in January 2018 both describe him as Orion’s president and founder, and the company’s website today lists him as chief executive officer and president.

By 2016 the company was describing a range that already covered most lobby formats. The January 2016 announcement, made when Orion added three people to its sales and production teams, listed pure optical turnstiles with no barrier, optical turnstiles with swing arms, bi-parting full-glass speed gates and mechanical full-height turnstiles, and said Orion had put building-information models and drawings of its lanes on Autodesk’s Seek library so that architects could specify them.

In January 2018, Security Today reported that Orion had joined the PSA Security Network, a North American cooperative of security systems integrators, giving its members access to Orion’s optical turnstiles, speed lanes and lobby products. The same report described Orion as headquartered in New Hampshire and making “American-made” speed lanes, and named Infinity Remote Lane Control as software the company had developed in-house.

From speed lanes to door sensors.

Orion has widened its range beyond the lobby lane. In August 2018, SourceSecurity.com reported that the company was launching DoorGuard, a system mounted above a door that uses a solid-state LIDAR sensor made by Quanergy to count and track people passing through, linked to the building’s access system and to Orion’s Infinity software. It was shown at the GSX security exhibition in Las Vegas that September.

In 2022 it added full-height turnstiles, the tall rotating gates, through a partnership with Tansa Global, a European maker of that type. The Laconia Daily Sun reported in February 2022, and SourceSecurity.com in January, that the partnership was presented at the Intersec show in Dubai. The resulting Orion Full Height Mechanical Single and Tandem models came in galvanised steel, powder-coated steel or stainless steel and were due to ship from Laconia in November 2022, with Orion’s Infinity software built into Tansa’s turnstiles.

Its current website groups the lobby range as SpeedGates — names include OmniLane, ThinLine and swing-arm, low-glass and high-glass lanes — alongside full-height turnstiles, swing gates and accessories. The newsroom announced the OmniLane, a swing-glass speed gate with barriers up to six feet high, in June 2026, and a data-centre screening room called DataGuard in early 2026. Under the heading SecTec, the company groups its software, including the Infinity control platform, and an Orion Experience Center, and lists further products as coming soon.

The company says it serves Class A office towers, data centres, universities, hospitals, energy sites, government buildings, financial firms and transport hubs, and its newsroom describes one financial-services client in New York standardising on OmniLane lanes across several sites.

Entrance control in context.

Entrance control is a quiet corner of the building trade. Its makers sell turnstiles, speed gates, security doors and barriers to the people who plan office lobbies, stations, airports and sports grounds, and they tend to present themselves through installations rather than through logos: a row of glass gates in a tower foyer, a line of fare gates in a metro hall, a car-park barrier at a terminal.

The products fall into a few families. Glass speed gates, which open a pair of panels for each authorised person, are shown in office lobbies; full-height turnstiles, with rotors that reach above head height, are marketed for site perimeters and stadiums; mass-transit gates line metro and rail stations; and revolving security doors and portals are offered for high-risk sites. In 2026 ASSA ABLOY summed up one maker’s range as speed gates, mass transit gates and security revolving doors, which covers most of that spread.

Case studies carry much of the marketing. Gunnebo’s press releases describe speed gates fitted in Shenzhen’s Galaxy Twin Towers in 2023, and Automatic Systems’ own timeline reads as a list of metro networks, from Manila in 1983 to Stockholm in 2007. Public buyers leave a record of their own: in 2023 the Brussels transport operator STIB awarded the maintenance of the access gates in its metro and premetro stations to Automatic Systems, according to an EU contract notice.

The trade meets at security fairs. Security Essen, in Germany, held its 2026 edition and has announced the next for September 2028; Intersec, now called Intersec Global, is held in Dubai under Messe Frankfurt, with its next edition set for January 2027. Ownership is consolidating too: in August 2026 ASSA ABLOY agreed to buy Gunnebo Entrance Control, in a deal expected to close in the fourth quarter of the year.

Made in New Hampshire, with star-gazing names.

The brand leans on two ideas: American manufacture and the night sky. “Every Orion product is designed and built in the United States,” the company’s website says, and it describes a 40,000-square-foot facility and locally sourced materials; a 2018 announcement called Orion “U.S. owned and operated.” The 2022 trade reports of full-height turnstiles shipping from Laconia support the New Hampshire base, and we give the wider manufacturing claims as the company’s own.

Astronomy runs through its naming. The company says its systems are “as steadfast and enduring as our namesake,” and its software and research names follow a star-gazing theme: the Nebula AI platform, the AstraCore ecosystem and an in-house research group called Constellation Labs, all listed by the company as coming soon.

Public information about the company comes mostly from its own announcements and from trade press, with occasional coverage in its home-town newspaper. Its sales voice is informal. In the 2018 Security Today report, Orion’s director of global business development, Tom Elliott, compared choosing a turnstile to buying a car: two speed lanes may look alike from the outside, he said, but the differences show “under the hood.” The company calls itself a “different kind of turnstile manufacturer” in the same report, stressing standard lanes for ordinary jobs and custom builds for entrances that a catalogue product cannot fit.

Support is part of that pitch. The company says that even after a product line is retired it keeps supplying parts, documentation and support for installed units, backed by service plans, and it describes working with architects, builders and integrators on each project. It exhibits at United States security shows such as GSX, which it attended in New Orleans in 2025, and its turnstile planning guide was written with the security consultancy Sentinel Consulting, the company says.

For a design guide, Orion Entrance Control shows how a young, founder-led manufacturer can build a brand from a place and a single idea, with an astronomical theme naming its newer product lines. Compare Alvarado, another American turnstile maker, and Fastlane, the British speed-gate brand made in Feltham. For this guide we use a navy, a muted gold and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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