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Wireless surveillance

Burgundy Estate is a 186 ha housing estate in the northern suburbs of Cape Town. It is an entirely new suburb and community in the making, with its own distinctive identity and views of Table Mountain.

By 2010, over 15 000 persons will be living in Burgundy Estate where 5803 houses and flats, schools, a créche, a 1115 m² shopping mall, businesses and large open spaces for recreational activities will be completed. What makes this estate unique is not only the large size of the private development, but also the fact that it has several public roads running through it and security became an issue to solve as private and public spaces had to be merged. Challenges of how to secure Burgundy’s residents without closing it off to the public was solved by Satinlink Wireless.

Satinlink Wireless provided Firetide’s wireless mesh network (WMN) technology infrastructure. The high capacity WMN modular solution provides a multitude of services and applications that benefit the residents and the security company monitoring the estate. These include:

* A combination of fixed and PTZ wireless video surveillance cameras stream 24/7/365 in realtime footage to the main security control room from every street within the estate and along its 6 km perimeter.

* The security patrol cars have been integrated within the WMN, and an LCD screen on their dashboard receives wireless live footage from any wireless camera installed in the estate, even when dashing to a scene, situation, suspicious activity or incident which is in progress.

* The system can be preprogrammed to recognise suspicious behaviours or scenarios, with the appropriate response. When detected the system sets off an alarm and immediately feeds the video images to the control room, which are relayed to the closest patrol car so that officers may act appropriately, armed with the right information.

* Connected to this self healing/tuning intelligent WMN is a series of detectors covering the estate, constantly checking for gas, air and other leakages.

* As value added services, residents can connect to the WMN in order to connect to the Internet, use voice (VoIP) for telephone calls, add wireless cameras to their home as an extra precaution, request that any alarms or video feed fitted to their homes can be automatically transmitted to their cellphones or wireless devices, keeping them in touch from afar. Services include video on demand (VOD), people tracking devices which doubles as a panic button, when a resident presses the panic button, an alarm will sound in the control room indicating on a map exactly where the notification came from and a patrol car can move in to assist the resident while the cameras in the area can zoom in and record the event.

“This deployment for Burgundy Estate validates that realtime wireless video surveillance is both economical and practical,” says Audrey De Jongh, Satinlink Wireless MD. “With the wireless cameras now in place, the security company can now respond more quickly and monitor multiple areas: we placed cameras in areas we previously thought were too far for wireless equipment to reach or too expensive to trench with fibre. Every telecommunications operator dreams of, thus offering to Burgundy’s residents’ access to guaranteed fixed and wireless broadband connectivity for Internet, data, VoIP and VOD.”

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