Titan Vision for Bolton Town Centre

One of the main objectives of any Council today is the safety of its citizens and security of the town's buildings. For this reason Bolton Council, one of the UK's top performing Councils, looked at expanding their town centre CCTV system whilst continuing to provide the excellent care and services for which they have become recognised.

However, the main issue facing Bolton Council was the need to centrally monitor CCTV images from 39 cameras at four sites, up to 7km distant from each camera. They also needed a solution which would cause minimum disruption to the town's infrastructure and was cost-effective to maintain.

Bolton Council challenged Visual Management Systems Ltd (VMS) to offer a complete affordable CCTV solution which overcame these issues. VMS evaluated options, using both traditional leased lines and wireless technology. Both solutions were to be integrated with Titan Vision, their secure, high-quality CCTV management application, which provides simultaneous control, administration, viewing and recording of live video and voice.

The traditional leased line option involved burying some cabling (fibre) and was liable to cause disruption to the town's infrastructure. It also incurred an initial set-up cost of approximately £200,000, with additional ongoing leased line and maintenance costs running at £100,000 per year.

To evaluate the wireless option, VMS partnered with 802 Global, a project-based wireless distributor, providing expertise for a variety of outdoor network designs and installations.

Due to the physical distances and network requirements of the deployment at Bolton, 802 Global advised that the Libra 5800 wireless solution would be the best solution to meet both VMS and Bolton's needs. The Libra 5800 offers rugged outdoor units, which provide a secure proprietary wireless interface, high data throughputs (up to 24Mbit/s) over long distances and non line-of-sight capabilities, which are ideal for future network expansion needs in urban areas.

The wireless solution offered tremendous cost savings, with set-up costs at £160,000 and ongoing maintenance and running costs at only £10,000 per year. Over 5 years this offered Bolton Council a saving of nearly half a million pounds. The project was awarded to VMS using a wireless infrastructure.

Wireless networking is an ideal solution to situations where major ground or road works are not an option or, as in the case of Bolton, where there are long distances to connect between control room and cameras.

Following the successful implementation of this network, Bolton Council has commissioned a further two stages of development to provide an additional 22 cameras at various sites around the city. These sites will feed into the Titan Vision system, with its robust in-built scalability designed to effectively manage large and growing CCTV networks.

"Our CCTV network now offers state of the art technology and remote management," says John Kirk, Principal Security Officer Bolton Town Centre.

The Solution

The images from each dome camera are transmitted via wireless from the camera to a central aggregation point. The signal is then transmitted via wireless from each site back to the town hall where the control room is located. The control room houses the Titan Vision viewing and recording system where images are viewed at 25 fps (frames per second), MPEG4 quality and controlled from a desktop PC.

The Titan Vision system also has software and hardware security measures to make the network secure and the feature-rich management system means that, should an incident occur, digital video footage can be accessed and retrieved immediately and burned onto CD. It can then be used by the police and is acceptable as evidence in court, according to the House of Lords Fifth Report.

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