Two CCTV installations – an airport and utility – from the USA.
U.S. Department of Transportation?s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has selected SmartSight?s Versalis to provide distributed networked monitoring and recording at security checkpoints at six US airports. TSA, which has jurisdiction over security checkpoints at all U.S. airports, is using SmartSight?s products to add CCTV systems to these entrance points in a standardized way. The six airports selected include Hartsfield Atlanta International, Orlando International and Baltimore Washington International. Visit http://www.smartsightnetworks.com
Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, the largest municipal water district in Utah, issued an RFP in August 2001 to provide video surveillance of its water treatment facilities. The District specified that the surveillance system had to be operational prior to the opening of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in February. The District is far flung ? it has 25 reservoirs at 15 locations throughout the valley. Over 300 miles of water pipelines allow Jordan Valley to transport and deliver approximately 46 billion gallons of raw and treated water annually.
Water is treated at two facilities: The Jordan Valley Water Treatment Plant and the Southwest Regional Water Treatment Plant. In addition, the Jordan Narrows Pump Station draws Utah Lake water from the Jordan River and pumps it to the Provo Reservoir Canal siphon pipe for conveyance to the Welby and Jacob Canals Diversion Structure. The District specified video surveillance at four critical facilities. The water district?s proposed contract called for adding CCTV equipment to four sites. They also specified that the surveillance include night vision capabilities. Salt Lake City?s Alarm Control Company bid on the project. In business since 1970, Alarm Control Company is a low voltage electrical contractor that provides fire alarms, fire suppression, access controls, CCTV and alarm monitoring to government and commercial customers in the western United States.
Will Naegle, Alarm Control?s vice president of engineering, says: ?One of the four sites was an unmanned facility 3 « miles from the water treatment plant. Pulling cable to that location was totally out of the question. We put together a bid to cover all four sites, which included using wireless equipment from a well known manufacturer. We were assured by this wireless CCTV manufacturer that their equipment could do the job at the unmanned facility. But after we were awarded the contract and were finalizing the engineering and equipment to be used, we discovered that we had been misled ? the wireless provider?s equipment could not perform as required by the job specifications. Our company has, in the past, developed custom software to work for special applications. But in this case, time was of the essence. We had to get the system up and running in time for the Olympics, and did not have time to build a customized solution. I turned to the web, to see if any manufacturer had the wireless capabilities we needed, and discovered SmartSight. Their products were a perfect match to the Jordan Valley project, and I redesigned the entire project to take advantage of Smartsight?s unique products. I placed an order that day.?
At the larger 30 acre site, Alarm Control installed 13 cameras total ? 6 of which were wireless. The wireless was crucial, given that installing fiber would have been impossible in the time allowed by the contract. Three and a half miles away from the 30-acre site Alarm Control placed a night vision PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera to monitor the unmanned pumping station. Twelve miles in the other direction another night vision PTZ camera guards an underground reservoir. At the smaller treatment facility Alarm Control installed six PTZ cameras and two fixed cameras ? using a combination of fiber optic and wireless networking. ?No one but SmartSight could have handled this installation at such a low cost,? said Naegle. ?What?s more, SmartSight delivers a completely integrated product. Instead of having to buy DVR (digital video recording) software and servers separately, I was able to purchase the entire package from SmartSight.?
Alarm Control Company purchased SmartSight?s integrated networked digital video management solution. The first to leverage MPEG4 and 802.11 wireless LANs, SmartSight offers compelling video-over-IP solutions that deliver all the functionality required to successfully manage the challenges associated with bringing analog CCTV to digital networks. Depending on the application, the SmartSight Video Solution includes Video Management and Storage Software / server (nDVR), a 100 Base-t Video Server (S1500e) and Wireless Video Servers (S1000w). While Alarm Control had the system up and running for the Olympic games, Naegle continued to fine-tune the installation. One of the improvements was to write custom software to integrate the intrusion detection system with the SmartSight system to provide automatic camera positioning when an alarm occurs. ?SmartSight?s technical support was great,? said Naegle. ?We were able to customize our software to integrate the two systems quickly and easily. Many of these new, digital wireless products will work fine with plenty of bandwidth in the lab, but they fail in the real world,? said Naegle. ?SmartSight?s Ethernet technology, which will work with a trickle of bandwidth, performs perfectly in real world.?
