IP CCTV - bandwidth?

[tmcd35]

Hi,

 

We have a couple of dozen CCTV cameras currently wired via coax individually to 2 PVR boxes. The system is at least 8 years old and quiet frankly the cameras are not in the best positions and images are poor quality. So, talk as started to replace this with a new CCTV system with more cameras covering more areas...

 

As part of this someone said the dreaded words - IPTV. Now, I'd admit this is a field I'm entirely ignorant of but my first thought is of 30 live feed hi res cameras bringing my network to its knees. Currently we have a single flat network, mostly 10/100 edge switches connected back via 1Gbps links to an ancient (ProCurve 4008gl) core switch.

 

We are looking at possibly some new switching gear as part of a new managed WiFi install during the next summer break, and with that the possibility of introducing VLANs.

 

The question I have is - what, from a network stand point, do I need to consider if we go down the IP camera route? VLANs? QoS? Bandwidth management/throttling? 10Gbps? New switching?

 

Any advice would be warmly received.

 

Thanks.

[mjk]

We just used firewalled VLANs. With decent cameras (h.264 encoders built in) the bandwidth isn't huge (150KB/s). Disk space is where we need to invest.

It would be good to get a baseline understanding of how much bandwidth you are using. Clearly you will be able to do some upgrades on the back of this project (we did!).

Axis have a design tool here:

AXIS Design Tool | Axis Communications

[Striper62]

Guide to IP Video

Hope you find it useful.

10 Steps: IP Video Journey | Chesapeake / Midlantic Marketing

[dhicks]

VLANs? QoS? Bandwidth management/throttling? 10Gbps? New switching?

 

Our 10 IP CCTV cameras are doing fine with no VLANs or QoS, although the plan is to sort out software defined networking at some point. We do have a 10Gbps fibre backbone, though, with Gigabit to the desktop. One three letter acronym you forgot was PoE - if you have Power over Ethernet capable switches and cameras it's easier to place the cameras, you just need to run an ethernet cable to the location. You can use PoE injectors, you don't neccesarily have to buy whole PoE-capable switches. This might be a good excuse to upgrade your switches and/or wiring, though - we re-wired the school for network and bought new switches, the CCTV on top of that was just over £1,000 and could be installed ourselves. Same for VoIP phones - £10,000 for the whole system on top of a new network. A quote for a stand-alone phone system was around £30,000, and we'd probably find similar for a CCTV system, so you might be able to convicne the school that investing in a new network is the way to get cheaper services on top of that.

[Duke5A]

I think my school district could rival London in terms of CCTV coverage: we're running two storage servers with 68TB of combined storage and 180 IP cameras of various models on a 1GB backbone network. The servers can spike up to 250Mb of utilization at times. All of the cameras are AXIS brand with most being low resolution models and about 35 or so high resolution ones. Frames are limited to 8 or 10 per second with above par quality settings. The software that drives the entire system is Exacqvision running on Win2012R2. Storage consists of two HP DL180G6 servers with each having 8TB of internal disk and an MSA60 shelf filled with 3TB drives totaling 30TB usable after RAID5 and hot spare. Crazy, I know...

 

It does work though - remarkably smooth I may add. There really isn't a hit on the backbone since this setup is spread across seven buildings with dedicated 1GB links back to the core. You'll be fine with 1Gb backbones, but at the very least you need to put it all on it's own VLAN.

[plexer]

We vlaned the cameras but 20+ ip cctv cameras on a 10/100 switched network with gig from core to edge switches all worked absolutely lovely.

 

Ben

[ColinP]

We have our cameras set at just 5 fps so we get best quality picture lowest bandwidth compromise