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Royal Thai Police
Wireless CCTV Case Study

3rd June 2008

Background

Late 2007—To enhance public safety and security in the resort area of Pattaya, Thailand, the Royal Thai Police issued a public Tender for a CCTV solution to improve coverage of public spaces with high quality video surveillance.

Globally, police forces are upgrading infrastructure to counter terrorism threats, aid crime deterrence, prevention, detection and traffic violation reporting.

At Pattaya, the CCTV Network would need to be deployed on a large scale and be upgradeable. Another obstacle was how to install it. Fibre infrastructure in the area is almost non-existent, and the digging involved in installing it would cause major disruptions to local tourism and be costly as well.

Wireless would solve these problems, but questions were asked— was there wireless technology available that could run a CCTV system this complex? Would enough bandwidth be available? Reliability? Picture Quality? The list went on.

Following completion of a set of requirements, A public Tender for supply was issued, and bidders invited. CableFree was approached because of proven track record with high performance radio, and specifically for CCTV projects.

Read on for details of what requirements & specifications CableFree' s products needed to meet, What trials the products went through and how the network was rolled out and will be upgraded in the future.

Requirements / Needs

A number of requirements presented themselves for this particular project, summarised below. One of the most interesting of these were the frequency restrictions. In Thailand, the 5.xGHz bands are reserved for military use only. Elsewhere, 5.xGHz bands are widely used for such CCTV networks, where more spectrum is available. However, with only 2.4GHz available, the radio network would have to operate in this heavily congested band which is extensively used by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microwave ovens and cordless telephones all of which can cause widespread interference.

A number of features unique to the CableFree radio products allowed them to overcome the interference and deliver on the required performance, even using 2.4GHz.

The CCTV Network would also need to be highly reliable, offer upgradeability paths & options and be able to deliver a considerable amount of video bandwidth simultaneously.

Trial / Proof Of Concept Phase

The customer decided to test extensively the proposed products to ensure they
could deliver the required performance.

Trials proved conclusively that CableFree was the only vendor with a product
that could run the system to required specifications.

Competing products either could not overcome interference, or offered too low
bandwidth, leading to video pictures that were either too poor quality, or suffering
picture "freeze" or interruptions which would render them unusable in a police CCTV application. For police, captured video has to be "evidential-grade", enabling law enforcement agencies to use it as evidence in any attempted conviction of criminals. Pictures need to be sharp and clear to detect vehicle number plates for automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) for traffic violation systems.

CableFree radios have a number of advanced features which when configured
correctly, provide highly resilient links even in noisy RF environments.

Following success of the trials, CableFree product was selected, and the roll-out
was scheduled for early 2008. CableFree provided design assistance and validation to ensure the wireless network rollout would run smoothly.

The network is now fully installed—and with excellent feedback. Plans for the
next phases of expansion of the CCTV network to cover other regions are now
taking place.

Products Used / Features

CableFree ICR (Integrated Client Radio) and HPR (High Performance Radio) Products were combined with Cameras, Switches, Monitors & various other hardware from other vendors to complete the system.

HPR Radios were used for the base stations and backhaul links to the main control centre as well as links between Base Stations for fail-safe backup. CableFree HPR Radios can be deployed with up to 5 sectors, delivering up to 72Mbps per sector.

CF ICR Radios were attached to each camera as client units, sending video data back to the control centre and receiving data to control the cameras.

CableFree offers free network design consultancy to all qualifying partners and end users: contact CableFree for free wireless network design advice.

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