Wavesight are proud to supply the communication infrastructure in a major fibre to wireless switch-out for a large- scale urban surveillance project, spanning three towns in Dacorum Borough Council. In this period of austerity most local authorities have been exploring ways to reduce cost whilst maintaining the quality of service over public safety CCTV services. None more so than Dacorum borough Council who have managed to secure capital to upgrade their ageing analogue CCTV surveillance system and simultaneously relocate their CCTV control room operations to a new location.

Requirement

Wavesight were requested to provide the design of the wireless communications infrastructure to migrate the council’s CCTV services from fibre to wireless on behalf of systems integrator ID Integrated Security, based in Hemel Hempstead. The land where the Council’s civic centre was located, based in the heart of the town centre, was sold for re- development, thus forcing Dacorum Council to relocate operations of its public service offerings. The sale helped contribute to the capital required for the re-design and relocation of the CCTV public safety services offered by Dacorum. The available proceeds coupled with the long term savings achieved by switching from leased Fibre to a dedicated Wireless network allowed the local authority to fund the CCTV system upgrade and relocation utilising cutting edge technologies to deliver an IP end-to-end solution. The tender process that followed clearly outlined the requirement of an up to date solution that is robust, scalable and capable of meeting the capacity demands of the service offering for the foreseeable future.

The Solution

Spanning a total area of connectivity of 20KM’s and three towns, a Millimetre Microwave licensed PtP solution utilising Wavesight’s Wave STREAM+ equipment was chosen in the network design phase to form the core of the infrastructure. Additionally, a redundancy topology was employed by Wavesight to deliver on the customer expectation of resilience at the core. Last mile access from the Core network was delivered via Wavesight’s 5GHz licence exempt radio solutions. The overall infrastructure utilised more than 100 license exempt Wavesight Ethernet bridges to provide last mile connectivity for over 80 street CCTV camera nodes along with a number of remote DVR’s to the backbone and onto the control room. In total over 100 CCTV streams were delivered to the new control room location.

This use of these technologies effectively provided the equivalent of a leased fibre quality of image, whilst managing to reduce operational costs and provide connectivity to the new control room location.

The council is now the sole owner of the dedicated, highly secure, private WLAN infrastructure, which provides the end client with more agility to change than a typical leased fibre alternative. The new infrastructure can be resourced and utilised as required, and is capable of growing with the demands of the end client with the minimum of additional investment. In comparison, traditional leased network infrastructure requires planning, civil works, planning permissions, etc. is typically more costly and lengthy to realize from concept to RFQ, up to deployment.

The flexibility offered by wireless technology has empowered the Council to realize additional plans and connections that have previously not been under consideration. The network infrastructure is already utilised in addition to the core function of CCTV delivery to provide bi-directional audio for town help points integrated into the IP network, as well as third-party remove DVR access on demand. Additional services such as centralised ANPR and Access Control to be delivered via the network are being considered.

Commenting on the project, George McDonald, System Integration Consultant at Wavesight, said:

“This was a very challenging project for wireless deployment predominately due to the nature of the land and the large volume of mature trees throughout the borough necessitating a Radio mast to be deployed at the new control room location, an additional third-party radio mast to be employed to achieve the required connectivity to two additional towns at the other end of a large valley. In addition, delays in obtaining access to a key proposed third-party building for wireless deployment meant that the initial design required various iterations of post-design survey, re-design and planning to take place, which consumed time and contributed to the deployment taking significantly longer than anticipated. Overall I am very happy that Wavesight, the SI and the end client finally arrived at workable solution to all sites despite the challenges.

The core of the network infrastructure solution is designed with reliability and growth in mind. We are confident that the solution will provide the client with the ability to scale the system as demands increase and fully leverage the flexibility of a Wireless network infrastructure over the next five to ten years.”

Project Integration

The primary contractor, ID Integrated Security Ltd. leveraged on Wavesight’s expertise in IT to provide additional value add to the project at the planning stage by, consulting, architecting, planning, supplying and commissioning the majority of key components comprising the core CCTV solution, on behalf of ID Integrated Security. Wavesight through its technology partnerships introduced Pivot3 Inc. and Genetec Inc. into the project with the aim of provisioning enterprise grade technologies at core of the CCTV system. The overall aim was to provide the best suitable commercially available technologies for the money, period.

Wavesight partnered with Pivot3 to leverage on the vSTAC-Watch scale-out storage product portfolio to deliver a scalable core surveillance compute and storage foundation, that is highly integrated and scalable, whilst offering a number of unique features. The key advantages beyond the compute-storage and multi-level redundancy provisions employed by vSTAC-Watch appliances are the reduction of power consumption and cost of up to 40%, the provisioning of VMware ESXi hosts allowing for Virtualisation of servers and services, thus further leveraging the available hardware resources, compared with traditional Client-Server architectures. Further value is provided by Pivot3’s management interface, provisioning the management of the SAN and required features for compute-storage appliances to be added on the fly without service interruption.

To complement the enterprise grade Pivot3 scale-out server-storage solution at the core, Wavesight selected Genetec’s Security Centre platform, to facilitate the front-end client interface for CCTV monitoring and reporting. In addition provisioning for system growth, by leveraging on Genetec’s unified security platform. Security Centre is designed to unify modules for CCTV, Access Control, ANRP, Dynamic Google maps and Remote DVR/NVR/Control room convergence via Genetec’s Federation feature, all via a single user interface, facilitated by licensing, on demand. One of the critical elements in selecting the Genetec platform was the necessity for Dacorum to send live CCTV feeds to Hertfordshire Police, who are already utilising the Genetec platform, therefore existing synergies were leveraged on.

Additional services existing to the council leveraged the new IP network for remote access CCTV locations facilitated by Xtralis’s ADPRO product line, as well as two-way IP voice communications by operators and help points, plus access control facilities, facilitated via Commend’s software interface and IP server provision.

The overall solution to the end-client delivered a highly scalable end-to-end IP network and enterprise grade CCTV system, based on the latest generation of commercially available IT technologies, to bring the Dacorum borough Council’s public safety operations and capabilities into the 21st century, whilst providing a solid foundation for addition of value add services and overall growth of the system, on demand.