Industry View

The CCTV Project Planner

CCTV implementations face a lack of product standardization, a confusing bidding process, and a limiting market structure. Here is expert guidance on critical considerations about bandwidth, frame rate, image quality and more

By Jason Cowling

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It's odd that the nature of the CCTV market is somewhat confining in terms of choices ultimately presented to the end-user, while the proliferation of new equipment and technologies continues in the industry. Consider carefully the effects of your selections. It's especially prudent to examine product providers' company history. How long have they been in business? How many successful implementations have they performed prior to yours? And what is their back-support offering for products? While most quality CCTV equipment may realistically last for 10-20 years, the company building and selling it may not, nor may the service provider. If the equipment you're purchasing is proprietary technology, be sure to consider what other service possibilities exist in your area in case you need to switch providers for any reason. Product platforms may be proprietary, open-source, or mixed in their ability to communicate with other platforms, an especially prudent factor if you're working on multiple sites in multiple areas.

Knowing these issues and their front-line effects is an important aspect of planning, implementing, and ongoing system maintenance for CCTV systems. Probably the most important take away from these broad issues is that your system is likely to contain a certain degree of flux, empirically and qualitatively. From a financial management standpoint, everything must be done to minimize the fuzziness of a CCTV implementation. From a planning standpoint it is crucial to spend time working with your systems providers, work with them to hone in on the best system at the best price point, taking into consideration their particular expertise and ability to satisfy your needs, and provide the continuing product and service support on your system. Planning in this way will provide the best ROSI, and the best functioning CCTV System.

Systems-Level Planning:

Keeping in mind the necessarily organic nature of a CCTV project, resulting from the market-level will further help the CCTV system manager, or end-user, with system planning, implementation, and ongoing system management. As an end-user, you should always keep your thoughts turned to the functioning system you're looking to implement. Oftentimes, if you don't focus on the end result of your system, you'll find your plan sideways. As you're planning your system you should ask several fundamental questions.

What network considerations need to be accounted for in the movement of CCTV data? In the earlier section on market-trends we discussed the lack of standardization in the CCTV industry. Bandwidth consumption is a primary example of this issue, and is further complicated by the organic nature of captured images. A few considerations, however, still make bandwidth a less than confusing issue. First, if you're going to put any number of cameras on your IP network (rather than on dedicated closed-circuit cabling), the IT department must be involved. Even with new compression methods like H.264 [PDF link] (which you may hear about during your site surveys), CCTV systems still take considerable bandwidth. Bandwidth is a significant cost factor for your video system, as the amount of cameras goes up, so does network consumption and the need for features like; bandwidth throttles, edge devices that only push data during slower network traffic periods, alarm features that only send data when movement in the image frame exceeds defined thresholds, or even video servers which are dedicated to the CCTV system. (For more, see A Buyers Guide to IP Surveillance Cameras.)