Aberdeen City Council CCTV & Door Entry Solution
The Challenge
Aberdeen City Council required a solution to provide real time monitoring of their city wide CCTV and Door Entry systems. The council had expressed a desire for the solution to be based on a wireless network to prevent high recurring expenditure associated with leased line solutions.The council stipulated that the design and installation would have to be carried out by a NACOSS Gold accredited contractor to NACP 104 standard as the wireless system had to be a transparent transmission of the CCTV and Door Entry security data. The council also requested that the design be flexible enough to allow for a quick and low cost solution to re-locating the control room to another part of the city.
About the Project
With those criteria in mind VWS embarked on a thorough survey of the sites across the city to be monitored. The survey included analysis of the current wireless traffic present at and around the sites to ensure no conflict issues. The result identified primary routes and back up routes for the wireless transmission that would maximise the bandwidth and throughput of the aerials. VWS designed the system based on their previously successful wireless CCTV/Door Entry networks for Glasgow Housing Association and others. This was however on a much larger scale both in number of sites and geographical distance. The wireless transmission was deployed using the Silvernet range (silvernet.com). Large bandwidth/distance aerials were used to create the main point to point backhaul links and were supplemented with aerials of a reduced distance capability to interconnect the blocks in closer proximity.
The Solution
At each block the aerials were routed through a Garrettcom industrialised gigabit managed network switch (garrettcom.com). The switches were configured using advanced RSTP(Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol) so that the wireless network was constantly monitored and if a link failed the switch would automatically activate a back-up link. The result of this has been a seamless service to the control room staff with very little downtime. The whole wireless network is monitored remotely by VWS to ensure rapid response to any issues and for the upgrade of aerial firmware without interruption to the client.The project also included the upgrade of several door entry systems to GDX5 concierge to allow the control room staff to be in control of visitor access at the blocks. The audio communications from the GDX system are VOIP ( Voice over IP) transmitted over the wireless network. The point to point basis of the wireless network design ensured that the audio was clear and not disjointed as can happen with MESH type networks. The access fobs are also administered from the control room via the wireless network which allows the staff to monitor usage and interrogate the central database fob activity. VWS completed the project on time and on budget whilst adding value by using fibre optic cabling within the blocks to prevent any interference issues at no extra cost to the client.
