Introduction
Tyco supplied Essex County Council with a state-of-the-art traffic CCTV system that delivers remote real-time CCTV images at a fraction of the cost of conventional CCTV transmission systems. The system currently links 11 cameras at strategic road junctions across Essex back to the main traffic control facility in Chelmsford.
Tyco Integrated Systems have provided all the cameras, site installation, communications and control room equipment including flat screen monitors and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for two control rooms as part of Essex County Council’s Traffic Control System. Instead of using expensive fibre-optic links, the system features high speed Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) broadband technology and uses low-cost broadband transmission over conventional telephone lines to link remote traffic cameras to two control rooms in Chelmsford.
Wireless links to selected cameras where direct telephone lines were not available at the camera site were also provided. Essex County Council plans to extend the system with additional cameras and links to other CCTV networks for full countywide traffic surveillance.
System Benefits
Internet Protocol (IP) based transmission over standard telephone lines can reduce data transmission costs by a factor of 10 or more. It also avoids the need to install costly fibre-optic links to remote camera links. Conventional traffic CCTV systems using fibre-optic transmission systems can cost thousands of pounds a year to operate due to the high cost of installing dedicated fibre-optic links from cameras to control rooms.
The system demonstrates that high installation and running costs are no longer a barrier to countywide or even nationwide traffic CCTV coverage and shows how excellent CCTV image quality can be achieved over the low-cost public network with SDSL high upload speeds.
This installation is one of the first practical applications of CCTV over standard copper lines with sufficiently high frame rates and resolution for traffic CCTV surveillance over long distances.
