The proliferation of high-resolution IP surveillance cameras combined with increasing use of analytics for various security and business intelligence applications have placed a greater strain on IT networks in recent years. While these solutions can tax the limits of even the most robust cable-based infrastructures, trying to incorporate them into a wireless network is an even taller order.
In this roundtable, five systems integrators from around the United States discuss the connectivity challenges of today’s video surveillance systems and how millimeter wave (mmWave) technology could be just what the industry needs to accommodate the bandwidth demands of analytics, high-definition and 4K cameras and other data-rich applications used in video surveillance.
Meet the Panel:
- Jesse Visocnik, owner and president, Visocnik Contracting
- Craig Lerman, president and CEO, LTW
- Jonathan Antar, senior sales engineer, A+ Technology and Security Solutions
- Jeff Torok, president, Am-Tec Security
- David Madrigal, president, Teksys, Inc.
What are some of the challenges you face as a systems integrator when designing and installing video surveillance systems?
Visocnik: With wireless network-based video surveillance, bandwidth is by far the biggest challenge, particularly with the government and sporting event projects on which we work because they use a large number of cameras deployed in different locations. In many ways, your system’s integrity is dependent on the connectivity strength of its network. If the network isn’t strong and there isn’t enough bandwidth, then camera latency will be high and the quality of images isn’t sufficient.
Lerman: Reliability is paramount when you are working in the public safety space, no matter what the current weather or ambient radio frequency environment is outside. It is critical that wireless network-based surveillance solutions are engineered properly for the environment in which they are operating. In addition, the wireless network components must be resilient, temperature hardened and be designed to operate in the target environment. Public safety networks employ mission critical voice, data and video solutions that cannot lock up or go offline during a storm.
Antar: The landscape can also be a challenge, for example, when you have a canopy of trees lining a downtown district like we did with a project in the city of Fort Myers, Fla., or when there isn’t public property available on which to mount cameras or other video surveillance componentry. Curb appeal is often important to customers as well. For some of our customers, small form factor hardware is a must-have, particularly in city surveillance projects and tourist destinations.
Torok: There’s really nothing better than fiber when it comes to network speed and bandwidth, but the problem with fiber is its cost and the complexity of installing it down a street. You can’t install fiber in a historic downtown area, for example. As camera technology evolves, the resolution rates are getting higher and higher and that means the demand for throughput is higher than a traditional wireless network can provide. Interference from other types of wireless systems can cause problems, too. If you use high-resolution cameras on a traditional wireless network, lagging and interruptions to camera feeds can occur.
Madrigal: Analytics software is becoming very popular and can offer great insight to our end users and their operations. However, analytics software uses a lot of bandwidth and can require throughput links capable of moving 10 to 20 Mb of data per camera, which is a lot of data when using wireless networks. When you add the bandwidth requirements of analytics with that of high-definition and/or 4K cameras, plus the limitations of traditional wireless networks and the addition of other devices competing for space in that same legacy microwave band, you end up with a saturated network that doesn’t perform well. In the current microwave environment, there just isn’t enough real estate for everyone and everything in that frequency band. This is obviously a huge issue in public safety because video surveillance networks need a robust, interference free solution to work effectively.
How is millimeter wave technology affecting your surveillance projects and designs? What is it helping you do that you couldn’t achieve before?
Visocnik: When installing a video surveillance system, often the wireless network is costlier than the cameras themselves. I would estimate that for most wireless video surveillance systems, approximately 60 percent of the dollars spent are for purchasing the wireless components of the system. A year ago, a radio that could move one Gb of data per second was priced at $25,000. Now we are seeing the cost is under $3,500.
Because we use mmWave radios, bandwidth is no longer an issue because the radios can move up to 1-5 Gb/second. And mmWave radios are now affordable enough that you can put up several ‘hops,’ as we call them, where you use several radios to avoid trees and other large objects that pose interference problems. One of our recent projects was for a professional football team’s stadium and the small form factor of the radios was a key selling point for the customer. We were also able to reduce the cost to the customer by thousands of dollars because the installation of the radios is much less time-consuming.
Lerman: We have been using millimeter wave for a while now and have deployed many links in our larger city-wide deployments. We recently deployed mmWave radios in our project with the City of Bethlehem, Pa., for the Hoover-Mason Trestle, which is a recreational walking path 40 feet above the ground at an old steel mill that has been converted into an entertainment venue. Obviously, there was concern for visitor safety due to the height of the walkway and its use at night, so LTW installed mmWave radios for increased bandwidth and throughput for the site’s video surveillance system, addressing a lot of the same issues that we previously mentioned: bandwidth loads, throughput speeds and reliability and durability in extreme weather conditions.
We have found that mmWave is really the most cost effective way to access high capacity throughput. The attractive price with the high performance make it a perfect fit for video surveillance wireless networks. Currently, you can buy mmWave radios with five Gb/sec throughput, which will soon be 10 Gb/sec throughput, which is as fast as fiber.
Antar: In Fort Meyers, there’s a canopy of trees and businesses all along the streets. With that project, we only had 10 weeks to design and deploy an entirely new video surveillance system, so going door to door to individual businesses to ask for permission to mount portions of the surveillance system near or on their property was not a realistic plan. As a result, we mounted some of the hardware to city-owned utility poles on the street. Moving data from pole to pole using fiber would be extremely costly, as would digging up the streets and sidewalks to tap into existing fiber. Fort Meyers’ city surveillance system uses 4K cameras and mmWave was really the only wireless option that could handle that much data within the parameters of the project.
Torok: Our business has been using mmWave for a while. We began using it because we were seeking a more cost-effective option for point-to-point wireless with high throughput. Some of our commercial projects require high resolution, so they use 4K cameras and also have huge networks with high camera counts. In these instances, our concern is that a standard mesh network using traditional Wi-Fi frequencies can’t meet the bandwidth demands of these deployments.
We find that mmWave radios are working perfectly for several of our customers by delivering the interference-free network connectivity and huge throughput these end-users need. We are also using mmWave radios for traffic management, internet connectivity to buildings and IP phones in several cities. Many companies in downtown L.A. don’t have access to high-speed internet service. None of these projects would have succeeded without access to 60 to 80 GHz frequencies and these projects would have cost thousands of dollars or more with other solutions.
Madrigal: Many of our customers are municipalities and often they want to cover a wide geographic area with their video surveillance system, but they just don’t have the infrastructure in place to support it. That means that we have to rely on wireless networks and wireless backhaul, which is problematic, given the congestion on these frequencies that are also used by legacy wireless networks.
Some cities also don’t have many backhaul points to begin with, which makes moving video footage across a network challenging. We’ve used mesh networks to cover some downtown networks, but they’re susceptible to the same bandwidth and congestion factors. One of our partners, Anixter, actually introduced us to mmWave technology and we now use mmWave radios as aggregation points to provide much better and more reliable connections for our customers.
Do you expect that adoption of mmWave technology will increase within the physical security industry?
Visocnik: MmWave is going to be huge for the security industry. City surveillance and government projects require super high-definition fidelity and most traditional wireless surveillance systems can’t handle anything more than standard 2 MP high-definition images. Another benefit of mmWave is its installation time.
Lerman: Video surveillance is being driven by the need for capacity and mmWave lends itself perfectly for that application, especially when priced competitively. MmWave radios have the right form factor, capacity and scalability for the ever-evolving video surveillance systems of today. In addition, the mmWave frequency band enables high density deployments without the frequency re-use limitations imposed by lower frequency (sub 6 GHz) solutions.
Antar: The industry is already struggling to keep the development of compression algorithms on pace with the demand for higher resolutions and frame rates. As that trend continues and intensifies and more and more wireless devices saturate traditional wireless network frequencies, the need for mmWave radios will most definitely increase.
Torok: As the internet becomes the infrastructure for everything, as storage of photos and videos goes to the cloud and the demand for faster and faster internet speeds increase, mmWave is going to be required. The demand for faster internet and network connectivity certainly isn’t going to stop. Ultimately, mmWave technology will save end-users and systems integrators money and time, which is why it is and will remain so valuable.
Madrigal: I do expect to see wider adoption of mmWave within the video surveillance community, especially if systems integrators and wireless service providers want to stay ahead of their competitors. MmWave provides so much more bandwidth than sub-6 GHz traditional wireless networks plus radio frequency interference is a non-issue with mmWave. MmWave is well-suited for projects that require reliable and high-quality video. Teksys is in the process of finishing two major projects for a municipality preparing for a large sporting event in 2017 and for the sporting event’s stadium that include mmWave.
About the Author:
Alex Doorduyn is director of business development and sales at Siklu.
