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West Lancashire District Council gave themselves just three months from the end of December to roll out a 35-camera CCTV system to service a 150 square kilometre area of the county. This new phase of the system is set to cover Ormskirk, Burscough, Skelmersdale, Aughpon and Parbold.
At the heart of this ambitious timetable is a Vicon-engineered CCTV system and a radio Ethernet network. Rochdale-based Technology Solutions re-built the CCTV control room to include a 1422 matrix as well as Vicon quad generators and monitors.
According to Council spokesman Kari Ray, not only is the roll-out exactly on schedule but the council estimates it has saved over £10 million in the installation – just by avoiding the need for roadworks and cable laying at £80 per linear metre. The furthest camera from the Ormskirk-based control room is some 7 kilometres away and the network is easily capable of relaying high quality video images without affecting resilience of the network.
In addition, the operational costs are greatly reduced because the council is sending images through 'free space' and so there is no line rental required from outside sources. Owing to the fact that the network is licensed to the Council savings are made by not having to pay licence fees to outside suppliers. While bandwidth is limited, reports Kari Ray, the efficiency of modern compression methods enables the network to handle transmission of images in its stride.
Technology Solutions has been involved with Vicon for over five years since they first installed a small system in Bolton in 1997. That system now comprises some 200 cameras.
For this particular project, installer, manufacturer and end-user were in uncharted territory as the video images were to be managed via this Ethernet radio network.
According to John Digman of Technology Solutions there was a significant amount of testing required to check the bandwidth and configuring of the Ethernet switches, as well as various line-of-sight testing along some 70 kilometres of network. It has involved a good deal of co-operation and co-ordination between the parties involved but the operational savings on costs are well worth it – particularly when compared to the costs of a cable company providing fibre.
The network is dedicated to carrying CCTV images. The Vicon components have behaved impeccably. Pre-installation testing meant having to take the Vicon equipment to the Codec manufacturer for testing to ensure compatibility and carry out any modifications. The modifications took about a man-week, according to Mr Digman.
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